


greater than

by astrosaur



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: (all Eddies love him), (he loves all Eddies), ...eventually, Ableist Language, Angst with a Happy Ending, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Fix-It, M/M, Misunderstandings, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Self-Acceptance, The power of friendship, background canon relationships, cherry-picking IT canons (movie/book/miniseries), off-screen childhood trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:40:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24561730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrosaur/pseuds/astrosaur
Summary: “I called him right before I called you, and it was…” Mike shakes his head. “I don’t know. It wasn’t the same as with you guys.”“In what way?”“With some of you, I had to jog your memory a little. With Eddie, it never seemed to click. I tried everything I could, but he kept… faking it. ‘Oh, yes, Mike from Maine.’ Like I could’ve been some guy he talked to once, and it was bad manners to say he couldn’t place me.”-Richie and Eddie unknowingly break each other's hearts more than once.It takes a Boss Fight with an ancient space demon, unwavering support and encouragement from childhood friends, a bold career move, and pent-up courage for them to get at the truth.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 25
Kudos: 125
Collections: Richie/Eddie Bigbang 2019





	greater than

**Author's Note:**

>   
>   
> Title alludes to the legendary Walt Whitman quote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”  
> 

Richie’s right leg won’t stop bouncing. He tries to squeeze it into submission, but his hands shake too badly to be of use.

Some unknown time passes before someone approaches them. It’s a new face, different from the ones Richie had badgered earlier. She asks if any of them can provide details about the patient for their records.

Mike and Stan glance at each other. Mike gathers himself, lifting his torso to fill it with breath, then proceeds to recite everything at his disposal with regards to Eddie’s identity. Stan pipes in with his own contributions.

Richie’s overactive leg jerks and scuffs the floor, an irrational objection over the other two flexing their curiously extensive Eddie-knowledge. “Give ‘em his dental history too, while you’re at it,” he mutters after the attendant leaves.

“Stan, you arrived here with Eddie, didn’t you?” Mike asks, neatly skirting Richie’s untimely sulk.

“I did,” Stan confirms. “I flew to New York first, then Eddie and I drove here together.”

“You what?” Richie croaks weakly.

Again, Mike does Richie a solid and ignores him. “That’s why you had me send his information to you.”

Stan makes an affirmative noise. “When you and I spoke on the phone, you were incredibly level-headed. As much as anyone could be in your position.” He drops his eyes, down to where his fingers fidget with the newly-frayed hem of his shirt. “The only time you sounded a little shaken was when you mentioned Eddie.”

Mike stays quiet in the space that Stan gives him to respond.

“You talked about him as if, deep down, you thought he wasn’t going to show up,” Stan continues.

“You thought Eddie would pussy out?” Richie exclaims. “Same asshole that turned Pennywise’s pupil into his fucking doormat before he even hit puberty? While his fucking arm was shattered??”

“No, I knew he would keep his promise. I wasn’t worried about that. I was worried about him _remembering_ our promise,” Mike explains. “I called him right before I called you, Stan, and it was…” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. It wasn’t the same as with you guys.”

“In what way?”

“With some of you, I had to jog your memory a little. With Eddie, it never seemed to click. I tried everything I could, but he kept… faking it. ‘Oh, yes, Mike from Maine.’ Like I could’ve been some guy he talked to once, and it was bad manners to say he couldn’t place me.”

“I was your flight risk, if anyone.” Stan’s whisper makes Richie and Mike strain to hear him. “I thought about not coming altogether. I thought you didn’t need me back. I’d only endanger you, just like…”

Just like last time _,_ he doesn’t say.

“Dude, I’d be buried in a sewer if you weren’t there to yank my head out of my ass,” says Richie.

Stan forges on, not wanting to stay on the topic. “I knew Eddie needed to be here, though. I knew that much.” He gets louder, steadier. “So I went to New York to find him. I ambushed him outside his office. And – same thing that happened with you, Mike. I told him who I was, he drew a blank. When he eventually acted like he recognized me, I could tell he was just trying to get me out of his hair. I brought up whatever I could remember. Jumping off the cliff at the quarry, him dumping boiling water on my knee to ‘disinfect’ a scrape.”

Mike laughs, raspy and warm. “That takes me back.”

“I threw memories at him as fast as they came to me,” Stan says. “I don’t know exactly what triggered it, but something did. Something got through to him. In an instant, it was like he could finally see me after I blathered at him for thirty minutes.”

Richie’s reflexes kick in to cloak the distress that threatens to surface. “So who wants to go tell the nurse that Eds was sustaining brain damage before he even got here?”

“I’m going to let that go, just because I know you’re acutely upset right now.” Stan levels a gaze at Richie that makes one thing clear: he has successfully retrieved highly classified information that had been confided in him half a lifetime ago.

Richie swallows as inconspicuously as he can. “You think I’m a-cute, Stanny? Does your missus know of your extramarital wayfaring?”

Mike’s phone whirs loudly on the chair next to him, clattering with electric spasms and making Richie and Stan jump at least an inch off their seats.

Richie glares in its direction. “The fuck, Mike, I had no idea you’ve been texting us with a vibrator.”

Mike reads off of the possessed little gadget. “They’re taking Bill and Audra to Bangor.” It seems like an era ago when Beverly and Ben had broken off with them, climbing onto the emergency vehicle that came to haul Bill and Audra off. “Ben’s calling. I’ll be right back.” He gets up, heading towards the exit as he puts his phone up next to his ear. As he leaves, he draws a line from his jaw to his chin, suggesting that Richie “might want to get that looked at.”

“How’s your incredibly permissive wife taking your impromptu dispatch?” Richie asks. He puts his fingers to the area Mike had been gesturing at and immediately pulls his hand away from it, hissing in pain.

“I gave her as much warning as I could, and we’ve been in touch every day since I left,” Stan says. “I’m thinking about booking a flight back home tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? What about Eddie?” It slings out of Richie’s mouth like a convulsion.

“What about him?” Stan doesn’t smile, but Richie can still hear the slight change in his voice.

Richie grits his teeth through the pain – not from his injuries, but from having to give Stan the upper hand. “Didn’t you say you drove here with him? What’s he supposed to do, drive himself back with a dislocated shoulder?”

“Oh no, if only Eddie had other friends with a driver’s license,” Stan deadpans.

Richie lets out a joyless laugh. “Yeah, that’s what I need, an entire fucking day strapped next to that anal-retentive asshole – I mean that literally, that stick lodged up his ass has been around since seven presidents ago.”

“First of all, I’ve done my time listening to you reference Eddie’s butt with every other breath, so spare me. Second, I never said you had to be the one to get him home.”

Stan’s smug sneer, a permanent feature in their teen years, makes its comeback. Because he and Richie both know precisely how this is going to pan out. It’s a foregone conclusion.

And it’s fine. Richie isn’t opposed to spending time alone with Eddie.

His only problem is a wound that had just been re-opened. Not the scrapes littering his limbs or the bruises that will start to take shape tomorrow. No, this wound was carved into him when they were teenagers. It’s a memory that walloped Richie in the backseat of a luxury sedan, before he even made it to LAX.

Eddie might still be blissfully oblivious of the harm he’d caused back then. Considering how long it took for him to recognize Mike and Stan, his consciousness could also be stalling before it regains access to the crimes of his youth. Eddie probably buried that motherfucker so deep that anti-fracking groups would preemptively protest him going near it.

Richie gets to relive the scene, down to every excruciating detail.

But hey, maybe he can use that to his advantage. If practice makes perfect, then he’s got a fucking blackbelt at suppressing a lifetime of grief and bitterness.

>

By the time Bill and Audra have recuperated and shipped back to Derry, the Losers’ headcount remains at seven.

Eddie’s been able to stay fully conscious for weeks now. At least that’s what the doctor tells him. He doesn’t inform them that he’s been in and out in these supposed moments of cognition. That’s a bit beyond their purview.

The eight of them – including Audra – have one last dinner together, piled into Bill’s hotel room with fast food takeout. Ben steals away to find a gluten-free wrap for Eddie and a salad for himself, but he later takes up Mike’s offer to share his fries.

They continue where they left off before eyeball-dumplings and blood-geysers interrupted their dinner. Eddie and Stan pretend to be wildly engrossed in each other’s professions the more Richie makes fun of them. Beverly enthuses about her friend Kay McCall’s work to an intrigued Audra. Ben arbitrates as Bill and Mike painstakingly debate a plot twist in the latter’s book.

It’s dizzyingly pleasant. The kind of scene that plays out right before the credits roll.

But it’s not about to fade to black just yet. Before that, Eddie has to make it back to New York in a car alone with Richie.

Recovered memories from their past tell him that they’ve managed before. Fragments of their history play out in his head – moments when they were desperately convincing themselves that nothing’s changed between them.

He convinces himself that tomorrow’s just an encore. He can throw himself in their performative back-and-forth. Caricaturize the real resentment he felt, shroud the more genuine hurt. The more dangerous yearning.

When the night dwindles, Eddie’s at Richie’s doorstep with a strategy in place. He’ll iron out the details of their trip, impugn Richie’s character a handful of times (strictly to maintain their balance), then retire to his room for a Sisyphean bid for sleep.

Richie gawks at him by way of greeting. “Aw, man, I knew I shouldn’t have cheaped out. Should’ve shelled out a couple of extra dollars to get me the high-class escort instead.”

“Don’t forget to set aside the money to pay for the therapy they’ll eventually need,” Eddie shoots back.

Richie beams, unreserved. “There he is.”

Eddie has half a mind to turn away, already off-kilter after a single exchange. “We haven’t talked about tomorrow yet. I thought we should go over it quickly before we turn in.”

Richie scratches at his stubble. He stands aside and gestures broadly to his room. “Why not. There’s no cable and the wi-fi sucks more than a thirty-man orgy, so even a pow-wow with Captain Checklist is a welcome reprieve.”

“You’re already packed,” Eddie observes with some surprise, noting the bareness of the hotel room aside from the zipped-up duffel bag on the floor.

“Strangest thing, it’s almost like I’ve been counting down the days until I can make it out of this hellhole once and for all.”

After closing his door, Richie makes his way to the bed and perches himself at the edge of it. He raises his eyebrows expectantly at Eddie. Eddie’s gaze flits between the spot next to Richie and the chair at the end of the room. It goes on far too long. Richie oddly keeps his commentary to a minimum when Eddie finally plants himself on the bed.

They negotiate an hour that is neither too leisurely that it offends Eddie’s sensibilities nor too early that it offends Richie’s body clock. Once a plan is hashed out to Eddie’s satisfaction, he takes a moment to recognize that this is no meager favor Richie is doing for him.

For all the time he’d recently spent getting reacquainted with his feelings for Richie, less of it was used to revisit _how_ those feelings came to escalate the way they did. Richie’s loyalty and unconditional friendship bore much of the responsibility for skewing Eddie’s platonic admiration into romantic aspirations.

Although Richie will no doubt deflect attempts at sincerity with his outrageous levity, Eddie thanks him anyway. “The others made it seem like you had no choice, but you did,” he says. “You chose to help.”

“Put the puppy dog eyes away. You can’t bust those out after your 30’s.” Richie grabs Eddie’s chin and wags it left and right, stirring equal parts annoyance and delight in Eddie. “Holy shit, Eds, you shave now.” His thumb runs along Eddie’s jaw, feeling for evidence.

“Don’t bring that fucking name back.” Eddie slaps Richie’s wrist, too light to knock his hand away. “Of course I shave, I’ve had a razor since high school.”

Richie chuckles distractedly. “I wish It didn’t give me back that image of your struggle mustache. I’d give my right testicle to unsee that permanently.” For a brief moment, his index finger comes up to trace a line right above Eddie’s upper lip.

“Here I was under the impression you didn’t have any of those left to give.” Eddie talks while doing his best not to move his mouth, lest it dislodge Richie’s fingers.

As their conversation gradually bows out and makes way for non-verbal communication, it gets harder to pretend that Eddie doesn’t notice what’s happening. How neither of them is breaking eye-contact. How Richie has yet to let go of Eddie’s face. How Eddie is about to renege on his promise to himself. He’s about to fucking do the Mashed Potatoes all over it and flip double birds when he’s done.

Eddie quiets the voices in his head that are in turns warning, doubting, and taunting. He shuts each one of them out. They’ve done enough. They don’t get to take this away from him, too.

Eddie’s hands find Richie’s forearms as he turns to face him fully. He can’t even tell that they’re moving closer together, but suddenly they’re inches away from inhaling the other’s exhale.

“Stubborn bastard,” Richie says. “You’re not going to put those babies away, are you?”

Eddie blinks stupidly before catching on. “What, my eyes? I’d like to keep them, Rich, I’m quite attached to them.”

Richie laughs softly, careful not to disrupt the atmosphere. He leans in as if to tell a secret, inhabiting more and more of Eddie’s field of vision until their foreheads came in contact. “You can close your eyes for a bit.” The puff of breath moistens Eddie’s lips and makes his chest hammer. The smell, even the hint of sourness, warms him all over.

For a second, Eddie’s fifteen again, hiding out in his bedroom with Richie.

He does exactly as he did back then – he rides along with Richie’s idea, trust coming too easily to oppose. He stays perfectly still, trapping the tiny sound at the back of his throat when he feels a pair of lips graze his cheekbone. Acting on pure impulse, Eddie tips his head up, only to land a kiss on Richie’s chin.

They burst out laughing. It feels good to be wracked in hysterics, like they’re back in their old clubhouse, or next to each other at the Aladdin, or mid-air doing a cannonball. He’s not done giggling when Richie moves to kiss him again, a murmured “oh, hi” snagging between their lips.

“Hi. Didn’t see you there.”

They trade languid kisses, returning each brush of lips with deliberate, solid pressure. When Richie coaxes Eddie’s mouth open, Eddie not only welcomes him in, he presses back until Richie’s jaw goes slack beneath his fingers.

One-by-one, the countless reasons not to fall into this moment are swept away. All that’s left are the heavy gunmetal eyes trained on Eddie, descending on the length of him.

“It’s real,” Eddie can’t help but say into Richie’s mouth. “This is real.”

“Rude of you to steal my lines.”

Eddie exhales sharply through his nose, composure crumbling as he fumbles with Richie’s shirt, making the latter fumble with his glasses. Richie can’t quite get at Eddie’s polo buttons, but he manages to figure out Eddie’s jeans. Eddie slaps him away, a panicked reflex, before stripping them off himself. Richie groans in response, toying with his own fly.

Eddie guides Richie to his back and hovers closely over him. Richie checks if he’s okay. “You just took your arm sling off a couple days ago.”

Instead of replying, Eddie places his lips over Richie’s neck, letting them get caught on his stubble. He finds Richie’s bobbing Adams apple, lets his lips part just a tiny bit to can slip over where Richie’s collarbone juts out. It earns him a howling approval that urges him onward to a path down Richie’s chest, onto his stomach. When he drifts below Richie’s bellybutton, he feels a hand pull him away. “Stop—Eds, stop, wanna do something for you too.”

Eddie peels himself away to peer up at Richie. “You think you aren’t?” He guides Richie’s hand over the bulge in his underwear. He whimpers as he presses against the large palm that he helps cup him over the cloth. “See?”

“Fuck.” Richie swears a couple of times for emphasis. He reaches out for the bottle on top of the bedside drawer, pumping out a dollop onto his hands. Eddie almost snorts at its convenient placement before Richie tells him, “Fuck my hand.” He slips his hand beneath his waistband, wraps his long fingers around Eddie. His other hand clutches Eddie’s hip, steadying him. “Yeah.”

“Rich.” Eddie holds on to Richie’s thighs, using them as leverage to slide into Richie’s fist. He bites his lip to keep himself from blurting out something that could ruin the moment, thrusting into the warmth of his hands. He reaches down and slips one hand between himself and Richie, slicking up his own palm before reaching just behind him and dragging Richie out of his boxers. An errant sound escapes him as he runs down the rigid length that he finds.

“You look so fucking good. You feel so good,” Richie says, manic with honesty. He jerks beneath Eddie as his hips fly up, up into Eddie’s fist. “Can’t believe you’re letting me touch you, Eddie, fuck.”

“Fuck, it feels- I—” Eddie lets out a broken moan as Richie grips him harder, orgasm creeping up on him with alarming haste. His legs splay wider of their own accord, inner thighs straining to extend as far apart as they can go as he pulses in Richie’s hand, covering him in his release.

Eddie lifts up and scoots backwards, sitting just below Richie’s hips, adjusting the angle for his arm’s sake. He shifts his weight on his knees and gathers Richie into one hand, cradling him to his inner thigh. Within seconds, Richie’s kicking his legs out and panting rough and uneven as Eddie kneads him. He gasps out like he’s got one breath left and all it’s good for is forming Eddie’s name.

>

The mattress quakes beneath Richie, yanking him into semi-consciousness. He wants to whine the unknown clamor away, but someone else’s groan beats him to it.

“Really, Eddie?” he hears.

His eyelids leap open. Sleep leaves his senses as the events of the other night come back to him.

While he recovers from the lingering disbelief that last night happened, Eddie continues to talk to himself. “You had to stay the night, too?”

Richie can’t contain the snicker that flutters out of his nose, alerting Eddie. Somehow, Eddie’s already halfway dressed, which is how Richie knows he isn’t dreaming this part up. If his imagination were behind this, there’d be far more morning cuddles and far less modesty. “You planning to wham, bam, thank you ma’am the guy who’s about to have full access to your wheels?”

Eddie’s brows knot together. “You’re not touching my car.”

“Your stitches and your dislocated shoulder beg to differ,” Richie informs him. “I got this, Eds. And I’m not saying road head is appropriate compensation for taking you back to New York, but you should know that Tozier Bank takes that currency.”

Eddie’s mystified expression doesn’t budge. “Why would you come to New York?”

“Did you take something last night?” Richie inspects him, mock-suspicious. “Either you’ve got recurring cosmic amnesia or I literally fucked your brains out. If it’s the latter, that’s flattering, but mostly alarming. Like, what would’ve happened if we had adult sex instead of dry-humping like frisky freshmen?”

The prompt repugnance on Eddie’s face is so believable that Richie almost takes it at face-value. “Don’t worry, it’s not going to happen again.”

“Don’t be embarrassed, babycakes. We’ll keep at it, get you some exposure therapy.”

Eddie shakes his head, professionally exasperated. “Just stop, alright? I don’t need this. One second, I’m running for my life, and the next thing I know, you’re sniffing around me like you didn’t already ruin my life the first time around.”

“What? The fuck are you talking about?” Richie is getting increasingly troubled the longer he’s unable to detect an ounce of mischief in Eddie’s delivery. But it’s got to be a prank. Eddie must’ve just remembered the time he covered all the soap in his house with clear nail polish – this is him exacting his revenge.

“Nothing. We can get past this. We’ve gotten past this,” Eddie says, emphatic. “We know better now.”

“Alright, you’ve had your fun.” Richie curbs the urge to ask for a mercy, have Eddie drop the charade. “Even I know when to drop a bit.”

“Yeah, sure, I’ve had my fun. This town’s a hoot.”

“Okay, what the fuck is this? If you didn’t want…” Richie’s dread is absorbed by a sneer. “ _You_ came to _me_ last night. I never asked you to come to my room and- and.”

Without meaning to, he gives one more pleading glance and gets Eddie’s frown in return, firm as permanence. “I have to go.”

“What the fuck.” Richie laughs derisively. His eyes feel treacherously warm, throat constricting. “No. Are you – you’re seriously doing this again?”

Eddie bends to grab his shoes and shoves them on.

Richie watches Eddie turn his back to him without offering a single retort or insult. “I knew it. I fucking knew this was going to happen, and I still—” He dry-heaves as a slammed door punctuates his sentence.

>

“You gotta do it,” Richie cajoles. “The lovebirds are long gone and it doesn’t make sense for Mike to do it.”

Stan sighs heavily.

Richie has a flashback of a winter day. Stan covering his frostbitten nose with mittened hands in the Toziers’ porch while Richie alternated between chain-smoking and spitting out the reasons why they shouldn’t hang out with Eddie anymore. Richie never explained why Stan needed to be there and hear him out. Stan hung around anyway, until Richie eventually croaked out that he never wanted to stop being around Eddie.

“You just have to change your flight,” Richie tries again. “Fuck, come on, I’ll pay the difference.”

“I don’t care about the change fees.” Stan taps his fingers on his crossed arms and stares at the ground. He lets out another deep exhale. “I will, however, take your money. And if you make an anti-Semitic crack, I will not be held liable for what I tell Eddie on our drive back.”

“I don’t care what you tell that little shit,” Richie lies. “I don’t want him dead in a ditch somewhere, that’s all. I’ll be the first person the cops come after, seeing as I’ve got no alibi and about five different motives.”

Stan appraises him. “You two looked like you were getting along last night.”

Richie panics irrationally before he realizes that Stan was talking about dinner at Bill and Audra’s room. “Yeah, well, you’ve met the guy. You never know where you stand with Sir Edward McMoodSwing, née Kaspbrak-on-My-Bullshit.”

Stan drops the subject, oddly lenient. “You’re also going to reimburse whatever I have to spend to make this up to Patty.”

Richie simulates a whipping sound out that Stan conspicuously doesn’t react to. “Nothing? What has married life done to you?” he demands. “You know what? You might be the only one who got it right the first time. Bev’s widowed, Eddie was pre-divorced, and Bill is… TBD.”

“ _Richie_.”

“Oh my god, Audra will be fine. Excuse me for trying to give you the win for once in your life. You’re welcome, by the way.”

For the first time since watching Eddie leave, Richie’s able to smile, thanks to Stan’s severe eyeroll. “You’re welcome, too. Even though I am doing this for Eddie, for the record.”

It’s Richie’s turn to scoff. “I got that. You driving him back to New York is not a personal favor to _me_.”

Richie’s hand moves from Stan’s shoulder and travels across his back. He pulls Stan in, and for his part, Stan lets him.

“Say ‘bye to everyone for me,” Richie says.

“Do I look like your personal assistant? Tell them yourself,” Stan replies, muffled by Richie’s collarbone.

As soon as Stan closes the door behind him, Richie heads to the lobby to check himself out.

>

Airplanes are wicked inventions. They suspend your life and deprive you of oxygen. They imprison you with a slew of thoughts that you could have allayed at lower altitudes.

Richie is defenseless against his recollections. Parts of it are obscured, edges fogged like overexposed film. Others emerge in 4K Ultra-high-definition. Misery and regret provide an upgrade. They meticulously commemorate little things, like the number of inches Eddie’s bedroom door was opened, the abstract pattern of the beanie that he was hanging up in his closet.

That day, some twenty-odd years ago, Richie was seated on Eddie’s bedroom floor, not quite reading the comic on his lap while he waited for Eddie to change his clothes. The second Eddie was done, Richie shut the comic close and leapt up to join him in front of his bookshelves.

Richie should’ve already been used to seeing Eddie looking so cozy in his fleece bottoms and hoodie, but his idiot body kept reacting as if it was the first time he was graced by such a vision. And when Eddie turned to glance up at him, he may as well have sucker-punched him.

Eddie had snow caught on his eyelashes. He had taken off his jacket and changed into a different shirt, and none of that had been enough to disturb the clusters of crystalline stalactites framing those cavernous eyes. Those fuckers were there the entire walk back to Eddie’s house, distracting Richie to the point that he forgot to make fun of Eddie and his six layers of clothing.

Frozen water caught between lashes had no right to get Richie that keyed up.

“Close your eyes,” Richie said.

“What? Why?”

“You’ve got.” Richie gestured to his own face. “I’ll get ‘em out for you.”

Eddie told him he was being weird, then humored him.

With trembling, clammy hands, Richie carefully swept the seam of Eddie’s eyelids, thumbs sifting through delicate lashes. He couldn’t curb his fixation on how soft the skin was underneath his fingertips, the contrast of heat and ice against the pads of his thumb.

When Eddie’s tongue poked out, giving his lips a quick swipe, Richie couldn’t contain what would turn out to be a deeply embarrassing whine. Heat rushed up from somewhere around his gut or his chest, up his throat like bile.

“Did you get it out?” Eddie asked at precisely the same time Richie vomited out his emotions in one breath: “Your teeth are perfect and you always beat me on _Heavyweight Champ_ and you don’t ditch me even when I piss you off and you make me not breathe right and your feet are the absolute fucking cutest.”

Richie’s heart skipped as he repeated his own words back in his head and wait a minute, did he say feet?

“…What?” Eddie’s eyes flew open. They took up his whole face – his whole _room_ – wide and muggy.

“You drive me up the wall twenty-four-fucking-seven and I want to kiss you so fucking bad.” Richie’s mouth had severed ties from his brain. Not the first time, but could very well be the most unwelcome.

Eddie blinked rapidly, unnaturally.

“S-sorry. Fuck, I’m sorry. Please don’t.” Richie cut himself short, devoting his energy into smothering what felt like heated coils tightening behind his eyes.

“No, Richie, don’t be sorry.” Eddie’s concern was nearly tangible as he reached up to take Richie’s face in his hands. “It’s just. I never thought you’d want anything like that. I never thought you’d want to…”

Eddie got on his tiptoes, and – Richie swore he was going in slow fucking motion – laid a kiss square on Richie’s mouth.

“…kiss me, too,” Eddie finished softly. He pulled away, feet flat back on the ground. He glanced back up at Richie, seeming too innocent after having just removed all breath from his friend’s lungs.

“Fuck me, are you fucking kidding me?” Richie mumbled, mostly to himself, before he launched himself at Eddie. They closed the distance between them, meeting somewhere in the middle. Eddie smeared his mouth over the swell of Richie’s lips, and Richie responded by opening his mouth incrementally.

Richie shifted them so that he had an arm supporting Eddie’s middle, and Eddie did his level best to leave bruises wherever he wrapped his skinny fingers around Richie. As they sought angles that deepened the kiss, Richie maneuvered them towards the door. He reached behind Eddie and found the doorknob in the middle of his flailing.

Eddie jolted at the loud click behind him. “What was that?”

“It was me, I just closed the door,” Richie soothed, barely getting the words out before continuing his quest to kiss the daylights out of him.

“Shit. Holy shit, my door was open.” Eddie’s hands skated down from Richie’s shoulders to his forearms, squeezing every step of the way. “Richie, stop, my mom’s downstairs.”

“She’s fine, she’s still recovering from our romp this morning.”

“Shut up, dickwad!” Eddie snapped. “We can—um.” Suddenly, he was barely audible over the pulsing in Richie’s ears. “My mom will be visiting my aunt tomorrow. She’ll be home late.” He extricated himself from Richie’s hold only to take Richie’s hands in his. “Tomorrow. Okay?”

“Yeah, tomorrow,” Richie agreed mildly. Like he wasn’t about to rush to the bathroom to get himself together. Like he wasn’t going to count down the seconds ‘til the day expired as soon as he got home.

That same night, in place of sleep, he had the remembrance of Eddie pressing into him. Idle fantasies of how far they could’ve taken things in a house all to themselves.

Richie spent nearly twenty-four hours straight jumping out of his skin, anticipating the moment when he and Eddie would be alone together.

When the moment finally came, he wasted no time in picking up where they’d left off.

He must have had an idiot’s grin on his face when Eddie opened the door for him, because Eddie openly laughed on sight. The sound made Richie’s knees buckle, and he had to compose himself. He gave it another second before catching up to the other boy, grabbing him by the shoulder and turning him around. He yanked the collar of Eddie’s little polo and pulled him closer.

“What are you—” Eddie began.

Richie slotted their lips together and didn’t bother hiding his moan. He’d only kissed Eddie once, just a day ago, and he already missed it, as if he’d atrophy and shrivel away to be deprived of Eddie’s touch any longer. He was so absorbed in cataloguing the horde of sensations that he hadn’t noticed the two hands on his chest until they were forcibly shoving him off.

Richie staggered backwards, disoriented.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Eddie screeched out a question as one long expletive. He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “What the fuck was that?”

“I thought...” Richie’s mind raced, blaming himself for being too forward, not easing Eddie into it like he was maybe supposed to.

“Get out of my house.” Eddie opened his door and hauled Richie through it, using enough strength to make him stumble. “I swear, try that shit again and I’ll fucking kick your balls so hard they’ll end up in your esophagus.”

It felt as if Eddie already made good on his threat.

>

Eddie and Stan swap stories about New York – Eddie’s current New York, and Stan’s New York from his college days. Stan talks about his wife and Eddie opens up about his own short-lived engagement. Sometimes they get stranded in their own mazy thoughts, and the reverberation of tires thundering against the pavement takes over for them. They avoid all discussion of the sudden switch of Eddie’s travel companions.

The sun is ducking below the horizon when they reach Eddie’s house.

Eddie never would’ve predicted the distress of knowing that, through those doors, everything’s going to be exactly as he’d left it.

He finds the thought of going back to his old life – resuming as if nothing’s changed – to be unbearable.

When Stan asks how excited he is to go back to work (from a scale of -10 to 0), Eddie musters the answer, “I leave that to Tony for the most part.”

Stan has no clue about the gravity of what Eddie revealed to him. He goes on conversationally, “Is Tony your boss?”

More like a coworker, Eddie thinks. “He’s kind of me, kind of isn’t.” He taps into the tenacity that he might’ve been reserving for someone else. The same conversation for another audience. “‘Cause of my DID.”

“DID?” Stan repeats evenly.

“Dissociative identity disorder,” Eddie clarifies. “Have you ever seen _Sybil_ or _Psycho_?” He winces at his decision to bring those up. He regrets not planning ahead and carefully constructing his narrative word-by-word. “ _Fight Club_ , I guess?”

Stan takes some time to respond. “I’ve heard of some of those.”

“Okay.” The relief that comes with just getting that part out is almost intense enough to wring tears out of him. “Well, a lot of them are bullshit, but…”

Stan digests what he is and isn’t saying. “When did you know?”

Eddie hoards another lungful. “I wasn’t diagnosed until my 20’s, but I’ve had it for as long as I can remember.”

“Is your other identity—”

“They’re called alters,” Eddie supplies.

“Alters,” Stan echoes. “It’s not just Tony?”

Eddie bites his lip and nods.

Stan copies his actions. “Were your alters around in Derry?”

Eddie nods again. “I couldn’t tell you when, but yeah. I usually black out when they take over. I know Tony was the one who told you guys how to kill Pennywise. He’s always going on about frameworks and compliance and that sort of shit. And Christophe took over when you’d yell at us to move. Christophe has killer reflexes.”

Stan listens without judgment, but Eddie hesitates to name more of his alters. He can’t spring that much in one sitting.

“You spoke to an alter first when you came to New York to find me,” Eddie decides to tell him. “When I came to, you were talking about the secret alliance that you, Mike and I had to rig the voting on movie nights.”

Stan smiles at that. “I saw something almost… change. When you started to really see me.”

It had been like a rush of adrenalin as much as it had been of memories – memories Eddie was already in short supply of, because they were distributed among parts of him.

“Did I hang out with them when we were kids, too?” Stan wonders. He rushes to add, “Tell me if I’m prying.”

“You’re fine,” Eddie assures him. “You hung around with some of them. There’s one—Finley. Finley was the first, we think. He doesn’t like to come out when other people are around, but he must’ve with you. He’d tell us about how serious you look finishing your puzzles, or how you’d wipe your bike down for hours on end.”

“I did not do it for hours on end,” Stan claims. “Finley might’ve caught me disinfecting Richie’s behind his back.”

At the mention of Richie’s name, Eddie shutters off.

Stan, being Stan, notices and changes the subject. “Thank you for trusting me with this.”

“I haven’t told the others yet. Not even Bill.” Eddie hangs his head in contrition. “I had all that time laying around in a hospital bed, and all I did was come up with excuses not to talk to you guys.”

Another stretch of silence descends before Stan speaks again. “When I flew here almost a month ago, half of me didn’t want to find you. I knew it was like voluntarily walking into a firing squad. But I did end up finding you. And when you made your mind up about returning, so did I.”

“What, did I somehow convince you that I wasn’t scared shitless?”

“Oh, you looked terrified out of your mind,” Stan concedes with a dark chuckle. “I was worried you were packing your suitcase mid-panic attack.”

“Folding calms me down.”

The corners of Stan’s mouth lifts, measured but kind. “I remembered how, when we were kids, you did the same thing. Marched into a lair made out of your nightmares, no matter how much your hands shook. And I remembered – you didn’t do it because you were any less afraid than I was. You did it because there’s something stronger than your fear. Something greater.” A beat. “I may need to be reminded of it more than you guys do, but I have that inside me, too.”

“I didn’t make you do anything,” Eddie points out. “You came to New York to find me all by yourself.”

“I would’ve been on a flight right back to Atlanta if I hadn’t found you. That’s the truth. If I didn’t meet up with you first, I would’ve never made it back to Derry. I—” Stan lowers his gaze. “I wouldn’t have made it.”

“If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have made it out of Derry, period,” Eddie says. “We would’ve died without you, Stan. Do you even realize how many times you warned us when we were in danger?”

Stan dabs his mouth with a handkerchief, hiding a grin that his eyes give away. “I said you’re strong, Eddie, not observant.”

Later, right before Eddie walks Stan out, Stan loops an arm around his shoulders. A one-armed hug from Stan was as meaningful as words of love from the others, as loud as silence from Richie.

Stan’s last words before he gets in his cab is a gentle but firm suggestion. “Tell him.”

Observant or not, Eddie could tell that Stan wasn’t referring to Bill.

>

Eddie stares at his screen, mesmerized by the hypnotic blinking of the text cursor. He gets as far as ten or fifteen words typed up before the cursor sweeps them gone again. Long past midnight, he drifts in and out of consciousness, bleary vision barely making out the thousandth draft in his hand.

 _If you ever feel like talking to me again,_ _t_ _here’s something I need to tell you._

He shuts his eyes and hits send.

>

About five years ago, Richie resigned himself to a life of mediocrity.

The desire to be exceptional wore out over the years, whittled down one layer at a time with every botched delivery and doomed audition. When people half your age excel where you haven’t, it niggles at your brain. Makes you wonder if you’re meant to euthanize your hefty ambitions and find something more forgiving to pay the bills.

After canceling his tour and dodging his manager for almost two months and counting, Richie’s career undergoes a requisite mourning period. He occupies his days with blood-tinged nightmares, day-long naps, vindictive playlists, and at least one ER trip due to alcohol poisoning.

He slogs through the Derry aftermath until he tires of Mike and Bill checking in on him, of Stan asking him if he remembers some dumb shit from when they were kids. They’re all doing the same thing, even though Stan’s less forthright about it.

Go figure, of the seven of them, his is the only trajectory in decline. Bill and Audra’s movie has proceeded shooting and Beverly’s relaunching her brand under a new name. Meanwhile, Richie’s debating rehab and perpetually smelling of night-sweats.

So he decides, fuck those other comedians.

There’s always going to be someone who appeals to a larger audience, with TV-ready smiles and mercurial wits. But how many of them stood toe-to-toe with child-devouring clowns and lived to tell the tale – twice? And how many of them withstood the most brutal of rejections right after getting a moment’s taste of their dream – _also_ twice?

There’s only so much time Richie can spend wallowing over multiple near-death experiences and a twice-aborted romance. He can’t stand idly by while his friends move forward with their exotic vacations and their blossoming relationships. One thing Richie could never stomach was the thought of being left behind.

At the end of his detox, he rings his manager about a project in development. Steve is surprised, to say the least, that he’s taking the initiative to scout a role, and that it’s for a theatrical production on the opposite coast. Most astonishing of all is the revelation that Richie is alive and is still in possession of his phone.

Steve is blunt about Richie’s chances. He considers their lack of connections in the Broadway scene coupled with Richie’s thin acting credentials. Richie dismisses these points, validity bedamned, because there’s nothing that a casting director could say that’ll sting even half as bad the last brush-off he’d gotten.

Besides, he isn’t going into this unarmed. He’s done a lot of research on the role, so to speak. Because he wants, from the bottom of his heart, to land a role for _Belinda Blinked: How the Sexiest Salesgirl in Business Earns Her Huge Bonus by Being the Best at Removing Her High Heels._

He has his sights set on the role of Rocky Flintstone, the author of the source material. In the play, Rocky serves as the narrator, providing opportunities to sprinkle in a Voice here and there. Richie can shake the cobwebs off the British guy and give Scottish and German a spin.

Adding the fact that the play is based on one of his favorite podcasts, and that it honestly isn’t too much of departure from his regular material, make it an ideal project for Richie.

His only enduring second thoughts about New York revolve around The Text. A message he no longer has to open to recite verbatim. He can repeat the entire thing backwards if asked.

_If you ever feel like talking to me again_

(Honestly, where does Eddie get off, making Richie feel guilty about not wanting to talk to him? Did he learn that from his mother?)

_there’s something I need to tell you._

Richie could very well go to New York City and not tell Eddie about it. That is a very valid option. He doesn’t owe Eddie a third opportunity to fuck him up.

But…

Eddie says he needs to talk. Richie’s equipped with exactly one (1) response to Eddie needing something.

Someone’s going to have to knock some sense into him, one way or the other. Richie decides that that person is going to be Mike.

He turns to Mike with the intent of killing two birds with one stone. Three, even – a good old avian homicide that would whip Stan into a frenzy. He’s going to get Mike’s honest opinion, possibly Eddie’s address, and he’s also going to come out to the last Loser on his list.

It goes like this: “Hey Mike. I’m gonna tell you a funny story. I’m in love with Eddie. Our Eddie. Dear old Eds with the double inhalers and the germ rolodex. Why’s that funny? Because that fuckery started when we were kids.”

Mike only has enough time to say “oh, Ri—” before Richie starts up again.

“Yes, chucks for days, am I right? I’m interested in boners outside of my own. So anyway, Eddie and I have somehow gotten into this cycle where he lets me, like, get close to him, like, tongues-in-throats close to him, then he does a complete 180. He’s done this twice. He goes fuckin’ batshit. But then, get this. He sent me a message a couple of weeks back saying he has something to say. I’m going to New York for an audition in less than one week. I want to hear him out and also shove his whole tiny body under three feet of landfill. Also, you have his address, right?”

This time, there’s enough of a lull that Mike can get two words in. “Hi, Richie.”

“Yeah, yeah, hi, hello, etcetera.” Richie loses his steam almost at once, not sure how to take the amusement in Mike’s voice. The lighthearted quip at the tip of his tongue steps aside for a third, slightly anemic greeting. “Hey.”

To Richie’s eternal gratitude, Mike doesn’t deviate from the lighter tone that he set for them. “I’m not sure you’ve put a lot of thought into this. You called the only other person in our group with no current romantic attachments.”

“I really don’t need to hear about writing hair-centric haiku or replicating some bird mating strategy. I don’t need advice.” This is categorically false.

“The way I see it, it’s coming close to thirty years. Maybe advice wouldn’t hurt at this point,” Mike breaks it to him. “Not that I’m offering any, because, again, under-qualified.”

“You’re also not opposed to acting on a long-shot theory,” Richie reminds him.

“Well, I’m hanging up the mantle when it comes to making decisions for you lot,” Mike says. “I’ll give you his address, but that’s not me telling you what to do one way or the other. I’ll throw in his office address, that might make more sense. He doesn’t live in Manhattan.”

“The one time I ask you to pretend like you know what you’re doing.” Richie’s back at square one, _I need to tell you_ ricocheting tauntingly in his skull.

“Even a man my age can learn a lesson,” Mike says, lightly. “Thanks for telling me, Richie. Not the tongue-in-throat part, but everything else.”

“It’s kinda old news by now, to tell you the truth,” Richie admits. “I didn’t mean to hide it from you or anything. I mean, I did, but I didn’t mean to hide it from you _specifically_.”

“Come on, man. I figured it out at least a year before Bill did.”

Richie sputters, and it peters out into a long groan. “You give Billy goat too much credit – he didn’t figure shit out. I only ever told Stan and Ben. Stan, ‘cause, you know. Nosy fucker. And Ben because we got drunk enough to commiserate over hopeless infatuations. Lovely moment, only one guy emptied out his stomach puking afterwards. Then Ben went and outed me to Bill.”

“Ben?” Mike repeats incredulously. “You’re kidding.”

“Ben, bless his thick, throbbing, engorged heart – what, what did you think I was going to say?”

“You and I both know exactly what you were thinking of saying. Anyway, go on.”

“Haven’t the faintest idea what you’re referring to. Well, Big Ben assumed I already told Big Bill.”

Mike laughs. “So, wait, you only told Stan and Ben. Did someone tell Bev?”

“Ah, Bev. She caught me in the middle of my very manly and very dignified breakdown, when Eddie lost consciousness while Neibolt was collapsing. She might’ve gotten a clue when she kept having to add ‘and Bill and Audra’ when I kept yelling that we needed to get an ambulance for Eddie.”

“That recently?” Mike questions, skepticism lacing his tone. “How do you know she wasn’t already onto you before then? This is Bev we’re talking about.”

“Then she had the decency to pretend like it was news to her. Like a real friend would, fuck you very much.”

“I love you Richie, but for the sake of your audition, I hope your acting’s gotten better since we were kids.”

“Love you too or whatever, but the fuck-you-very-much still stands.”

>

After Stan, Beverly (and by extension, Ben) is next to find out.

“I can’t even begin to imagine what that’s like.” The line crackles with Beverly’s weighty breath. “And you…?”

“I don’t go through all of it, not as myself. I guess that’s the point of having DID.” Eddie laughs humorlessly. “If that makes sense.”

“I think I get what you mean.”

“Yeah. I guess it helps.” Eddie bites back his own counterarguments. “And it is better now that my alters and I are more aware of each other. We have a calendar now. I hear about what they did, where they went, things like that.”

“That sounds difficult.” Beverly’s sincerity tugs out a twinge of hurt from Eddie. He doesn’t want her pity – he has no need for anyone’s pity, but hers least of all.

“It’s fucked up,” Eddie says point-blank. “I shouldn’t have needed it.”

“No,” Beverly agrees. “You didn’t deserve what happened to you.”

“Yeah, but I mean, I shouldn’t have needed to crack into pieces to get through it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that.” Beverly’s tone changes, adopting an edge.

“It’s true, though. As fucked up as our childhoods were, collectively, it was nothing compared to what _you_ had to go through,” Eddie says. “But didn’t you need it. You were—”

“No, stop,” Beverly cuts him off. “I’m sorry. Maybe this makes me a shitty friend, but I can’t listen to this.”

Eddie wavers and backs off. “No, I’m the shitty one. I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry.”

He hears a muffled voice in the background that Beverly shushes. “I didn’t get over everything and set it aside once and for all. That’s not how it works.”

The pressure against Eddie’s ribs worsens at the thought of Beverly reliving her trauma over and over again. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—I just meant, you’ve had to be so strong.”

“We both do what we have to in order to cope. What makes—wait, wait your turn!”

Muted signs of a scuffle follow, rushed apologies, and then Ben’s voice is filling Eddie’s ear. “You are the strongest people I’ve ever met. The two of you.”

“Sorry, you’re on speaker now,” Beverly explains. “And I was going to get to that before this big softie here couldn’t hold his burning declarations anymore.”

“Sorry to intrude, but you have to listen to me, Eddie, okay? You are strong.”

Eddie grimaces. “Guys, I. We don’t need to do this.”

“We saw it,” Ben persists. “We saw you stand up to Bowers. To Pennywise! Even your own mother.”

Eddie sighs, recognizing that Ben was not about to let this go. “Half of that was— Those were my alters.”

“Your alters – that means they’re a part of you, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Eddie denies, counter to what he’s been told before.

“Have you considered talking to others about it?” Beverly asks, letting softness back in her tone. “People who study the condition?”

“I’ve tried at least four treatment centers. Franklin keeps going like it’s some kind of hobby. Sorry, um. Franklin’s another alter.”

“I see. How were those places like? Do you remember them?”

“There was a therapist we liked. She helped me learn more about my alters. Helped me work with them.” Eddie owes a lot to Dr. Sahana’s patience and non-prescriptiveness.

“Have you seen her again since coming back from Maine?”

“That’s right.” Ben, not for the first time, is openly in awe of Beverly. “You’ve got your Derry memories back and she can help stitch those together, too.”

Eddie’s excuses sound feeble in his head, so he doesn’t subject his friends to them. Instead, he voices his realization. “I should try and see her again.”

>

In place of Stan’s hushed curiosity or Beverly and Ben’s nearly zealous empathy, Mike’s response is surprisingly sentimental.

After Eddie gives him the bullet points on DID, Mike shares a memory. He recounts a time when they were at the clubhouse. Richie was snickering at a school project he and Ben were working on, while Mike was in the hammock, watching a card game between Beverly, Bill, Stan, and Eddie.

Things were relatively quiet until Eddie had yelled at everyone to shut up while it was his turn.

Someone – could’ve been Beverly or Richie – said something to the effect of “no one’s saying anything, kid”, and Eddie brought his head down between his knees and wore both palms like a helmet. He’d stayed like that for a while.

“I don’t remember that. I don’t remember a lot of things,” Eddie says when Mike is done reminiscing. (And of course he didn’t – it sounded like a memory that Finley would have.) “Why did that stick out to you?” he wonders.

“I’m not sure. Maybe because I didn’t make as many memories with you guys? Things stood out to me more,” Mike says.

Eddie is stricken despite Mike’s casual answer. Although his and Mike’s circumstances are different, he understands how it feels to miss out on memories that others create without you.

In his mind, Franklin coaches Eddie on what to tell Mike, sentiments that a rare friend is entitled to. Franklin reminds him that he can do anything for his friends. He even offers to take over for him, if that’s what Eddie wants.

Then, there’s another voice, this one coming in through his ear. “Eddie?” Mike prods. “Still there?”

“I’m here. Sorry, I was just thinking.” Eddie jostles the words out of his throat. “They stand out to me, too. Doesn’t matter how many I have, or if they’re split up inside me.” He forces himself not to care that he isn’t translating his feelings nearly as well as he’d like to. “There are things that I wouldn’t be able to forget. You know? Whatever else happens, I wouldn’t forget someone who stayed behind to save a town that oppressed him.”

“Thank you,” Mike says, after a beat. “You didn’t have to say that.”

It’s a polite signal to stop, which Eddie doesn’t heed. “I wouldn’t forget Finley’s favorite. Finley’s one of my alters. He’s—well, he’s picky. He is so picky with company, Mike, you have no idea. He likes Stan well enough, but you, you’re his fucking hero.”

“Finley sounds like a cool guy,” Mike decides with a laugh.

Eddie returns it.

Even though Franklin would’ve navigated the conversation a little more elegantly, Eddie figures that his own words are enough this time. If only because they’re _his_ words to give, _his_ indebtedness to convey.

>

Richie’s turn comes like a bullet train. Or maybe just a bullet.

Eddie doesn’t feel entirely ready to have the conversation with him, even though he had time to gear up for it. He’d gotten a six-day notice from Richie about the latter’s audition in New York.

In truth, he’s ill-prepared for _any_ type of conversation with Richie. He’s still unclear on how they left things in Derry. Christophe was the last to see Richie, and he hadn’t filled Eddie in on much besides taking a morning run. Eddie could only speculate on what happened. Christophe might’ve left without exchanging a word with Richie. Or they might’ve talked, and Richie could’ve backtracked and rehashed the conclusion he came to in their adolescence.

There’s not much to go off of, but perhaps it says something that Richie eventually took up Eddie’s offer to meet. Even if it’s close to three months after it was extended.

On the day itself, Eddie leaves work long past their agreed-upon meeting time. His tardiness distracts him from other sources of nausea. He refreshes his ETA on Google Maps obsessively.

He hurries through the doors of Richie’s hotel and searches for the bar Richie texted about. He doesn’t have to look far before he spots Richie on a lounge chair.

The sight of Richie waiting for him brings a lump to Eddie’s throat. Stress wakes Franklin’s presence in his head, and once again, Franklin is there to talk him off the ledge. He gets him to repeat breathing exercises until the room stops spinning. Eddie hones in on the stretch of his belly as it fills with air. On one last long exhale, he shuffles forward, resolutely moving one foot in front of the other.

He stops right beside Richie’s chair. One arm comes up, floating by the side of his head for a cramped little wave. Upwards of a hundred things he wants to say and they get condensed to a halting exhalation: “Hey.”

Richie jerks out of his reverie and pins on a conflicted sort of grin. “It’s about fucking time. I thought I was still in the wrong time zone for a second.”

Eddie retracts his hand awkwardly and deposits himself in the seat across from Richie. “Sorry I’m late. I got held up.” He had been powerless as he watched Tony forge on after working hours to get ahead of a deadline. It’s almost worse when he’s cognizant of what his alters are doing while he takes a backseat, stuck observing behind a one-way mirror. “So? How did it go?”

“Mind-numbingly. This hotel’s cable is the fucking worst. Pundits hollering, a documentary on _The Power Station’s_ only three songs, endless reruns of _Big Bang Theory_ – which at this point is the equivalent of television static.”

“I don’t give a shit about that. I’m not Expedia, Richie, I meant your audition.”

Richie succumbs to honking fits of giggles that are inexplicably charming. “‘I’m not Expedia, Richie.’” He swipes at the glass of whisky on the table, downing it in one go. “My audition. Who the fuck knows? Not as if it’s my opinion that matters. I can think I killed it, and those microdicks can think I cocked it up so bad that it’s going to form a club with your mom’s vagi—”

“Oh my god, are you serious?” Eddie groans. “What fucking year is this?”

Richie makes a show of glancing at his bare wrist. “Let’s see. Adding the time I waited for you to finally fucking get here… it must be 2042.”

Eddie lets that go. “What were you auditioning for?”

Richie perks up. “It’s a play based on _My Dad Wrote A Porno_. You heard of it?”

Eddie hasn’t finished shaking his head before Richie launches into a comprehensive account of a play that’s based on a podcast that revolves around a book – an erotic novel, to be precise. Richie cites his favorite excerpts, each featuring ridiculous and anatomically dubious prose. He recounts them with such unmitigated glee that Eddie has no choice but reciprocate.

Richie explains that he is, unsurprisingly, aiming for the role of the titular father-slash-pornographer. He does a couple of his lines, some that have him monologuing in various European accents.

“You’re doing your Voices.” Nostalgia blooms in Eddie’s chest, warmth squiggling through his veins. “They’re not as offensively shitty as before.”

“Golly fucking gee, Mr. Kaspbrak. How are my panties expected to stay up in the face of such aggressive wooing?” Despite his words and the sarcastic way he clasps his hands in a proper swoon, Richie looks sincerely pleased by the backhanded compliment.

“You could only get better,” Eddie reasons. “They were annoying as fuck and a good number of them were overtly racist. Although, when you slipped into a Voice, sometimes it made me feel…”

He hesitates. He knows he has to take the next step. Terrifying as it is, it’s no more than a single, solitary step.

“Less alone.” Eddie pushes past the anxiety crippling his tongue. “Less wrong. I could pretend that maybe you were a bit like me, too.”

“What do you mean?”

One foot in front of the other. Just an inch from where you used to be.

“I could pretend you had them in your head, too,” murmurs Eddie. “Voices that aren’t yours. Voices that push you out, shut you out for a few hours. Sometimes for days.”

Suddenly, Richie’s pitched forward, hands gripping the armrests of Eddie’s chair, so tight that color drains from his knuckles. “Fuck, Eddie, is everything okay?”

“That’s a hard one to answer.” Eddie lets out a thin, nervous laugh. “Remember when I told you there’s something I needed to tell you?”

“No. _No_!” Richie raises his voice, and Eddie glances self-consciously around the room. “We did not get rid of that planet-gobbling ass crack just for you to—”

“Rich, relax. It’s not what you’re thinking. It’s not that bad.” Eddie waits for the agitation between Richie’s eyebrows subside. “Okay?” He pats Richie’s wrists soothingly. “I have dissociative identity disorder. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

“Dissociative—fuck. Fuck.” Richie gradually slips his hands out from beneath Eddie’s as he retreats to his chair, the shell-shocked look on his face cemented into his features. “You’re saying you’ve got this ‘voice’ inside you and it can do whatever it wants?”

Eddie’s first instinct is to lash out. “I mean, you don’t have to make it sound like I’m about to set a chainsaw killer loose in the Tri-State area.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Eddie continues defensively, “They’re not violent. That’s just in those bullshit movies you used to make us watch.”

“‘They’. How many ‘voices’ are there? Are- are you a ‘voice’?”

Eddie’s not sure how to answer the second question, but he tackles it first. “I’m the host. The others are the alters.” The other question isn’t easy, either. He hadn’t planned to divulge so much right away.

Richie’s eyes are trained on him, staggering with its unflagging attention.

“I’m not sure how many there have been – some have come and gone.” Eddie holds his breath, watching Richie’s face as his words sink in. “Right now, there’s six that I know of.”

>

Six others. With Eddie himself, that makes lucky seven.

The first thing Richie wants to ask is who the fuck was it that he kissed, and who was it he got off with. He’s barely able to swerve from that wildly inappropriate investigation. Unfortunately, his mouth instead blurts out, “That’s _insane_.”

Eddie’s expression darkens.

Richie winces. “Fuck, Eds, that sounded— I didn’t mean—”

“You know, Eddie says he detests that name, and I think it’s because I never minded it. Eddie can’t go around agreeing with me.” His voice is pitched high, too high to have been reached by adolescence. His words speed into each other, a hundred miles a second.

“You don’t mind ‘Eds’? You’re. Not Eddie?” Richie enunciates like he’s learning a new language. “Are you a voice? No, what did he say… an alternate?”

“Alter,” Not-Eddie corrects. “That’s what the doctors call us.”

“Okay.” Richie’s unsure how to proceed. “Okay, so. Hi. You gotta excuse my pal Eddie – bit rude, that one, he never introduced us. My name’s Richie. What do I call you? Do I call you Eds?”

“I know who you are. Who the fuck else would call us Eds?” Not-Eddie retorts. “My name’s Theodore. The others call me Theo.”

Richie tries out the name in his mouth. “Theodore. Theo. Eds. Okay.”

“Stop saying ‘okay’, fucknuts. Don’t be so obvious about short-circuiting. How do you think the old man’s going to react when you’re like that?” Theo says. “The more you freak out, the more it’ll freak him out, and the more he freaks out, the more he’s gonna squawk about his fucking blood pressure.”

“Old man? You mean Eddie?”

“Yeah, that old fossil. The guy’s got a thousand lines on his face and is collecting gray hairs right above his left ear.” Theo pats the offending side of his head. “It’s nasty under there.”

“Don’t you, uh. Share a body with him?” Suddenly Richie’s ten again, pestering his parents with questions that grow more ludicrous than the last.

Theo waves him off with a put-upon expression. “First thing you gotta learn is, I’m not him. You got that? I’m not chickenshit. I protect this geezer from his monsters, and he’s got a whole fucking cast of them. You know about the clown, Bowers and Hockstetter and the rest of those dickbags. Then we’ve got his mom and his ex-fiancée – or, okay, that last one was on Tony, but I helped. The point is, I did a lot of the heavy-lifting most of the time, before the other alters even came around.”

Richie had almost forgotten what it was like to try and get a word in edgewise with Eddie when he was especially worked up. “You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

“No shit! I even had germs on my plate. Germs, can you believe that? You’re friends, you’ve got some idea. What kind of kid gets paralyzed by fucking germs?”

The kind that inspires a lifelong adoration, Richie’s mind responds in private.

Listening to the tidal wave that is Theo’s torrential raving is like slipping back in a conversation that Richie dropped out of twenty-something summers ago. It’s surreal. In front of him is a living monument of the person he’d riled up as part of his daily regimen.

Richie lets Theo drone on until he tires himself out, interrupted by a jaw-splitting yawn. His eyes are lidded and watery.

The flash of disappointment at having to let Theo go is overridden by a more urgent question of how this 13-year-old in a 40-year-old body is planning to get home.

Richie pushes the panic button against Theo’s instructions not to, hardly mollified when Theo indignantly claims that he commutes home regularly. It’s not like Richie thinks that Theo can’t take care himself, but it’s hard to take his word at face-value – this persona that appears to embody Eddie’s rebellious streak.

After they part, Richie itches to text Eddie/Theo to check in on him. He sort of succeeds in that he ends up calling instead.

The first time he tries, he gets a cross “I’m still on the train, dumbass, do not fucking call me again” in lieu of a greeting. It’s abruptly followed by a conclusive electronic tone.

He gets a slightly nicer affirmation on his second attempt, one that even comes with a wish for him to have a good night.

He isn’t sure if it was Eddie who picked up that time. Whoever it was, that voice occupies his hotel room for the rest of the night. Two small words bounce around in his head as he tosses and turns in obnoxiously comfortable sheets.

>

Richie receives yet another major plot twist, rivaling Eddie’s news. He gets word that he’s made it to the next round of auditions for _Belinda Blinked_.

As much as he tries to keep his cool about the callback, his idiot brain shamelessly feeds him with constructs of basking in delighted approval of a faceless audience.

The additional perk of possibly seeing Eddie more often (or Theo or whoever else) strengthens his resolve, to say the least.

Richie hauls himself back to New York. While busting his ass to be the best Rocky Flintstone he can be, he also makes it a point to lure Eddie out after work or during the weekend. They text each other for restaurant recommendations and midday coffee breaks (Eddie calls them abductions). Once, he enlists Eddie’s help to run lines.

They don’t talk about their last night in Derry.

Rather than striking out for good (that’s three strikes, _yerrr out_!), Richie turns his attention to sussing out the six alters Eddie told him about. His addictive nature transfers to piecing together the workings of Eddie’s intricate compartmentalization.

Theo, Franklin, and Tony crop up fairly often. Their mannerisms blend with Eddie’s, and sometimes it’s hard to tell when they’re around.

It’s easiest with Finley.

Finley clams up when Richie tries to talk to him. He sits with his knees hugged to his chest. The one time he strings more than five words together is when Richie makes an offhand comment about Eddie’s car. Finley mouths the year, the make, the model. He stops to take a breath before he recounts its length, its wheelbase, its turning radius. He rattles off one minutia after the other. Horsepower, torque, MPG, drag coefficient.

One thing he learns about Finley: Richie’s sure he’s seen him before. Not often, but enough that he’s familiar.

Finley makes Richie think back to the time they found Eddie stashed in a locker, curled in on himself, mouth moving but silent. Or those days they wouldn’t see or hear from Eddie, not even when he’d nicked Stan’s binoculars to peep through Eddie’s window.

He figures that Eddie needed Finley when he was very young, judging by Finley’s age. Beyond that, Richie has to fill in the blanks. He may never find out every nitty-gritty detail of Eddie’s childhood trauma from the source itself – maybe it’s best that he doesn’t.

Finley’s not the only one with a tell. Tony’s got one, too – he talks about work a lot. As in, _a lot_.

One day, he bitches exhaustively about the bureaucratic abyss that is white-collar America, sustaining the rant throughout the 45-minute train ride from Penn Station to Mineola.

From the station to Eddie’s place, it’s a short drive – walking distance, really. Despite Eddie’s affinity for cars, he avoids driving long distances so as not to risk putting Finley or Theo (who are essentially too young to drive) behind the wheel.

One thing Richie learns about Tony: he doesn’t belong behind the wheel, either.

In single-digit minutes, Tony finds no less than three other drivers to verbally abuse. Apparently the guy’s the Goldilocks of the road, and everyone else either moves too slow or too fast for his liking.

It should be unspeakably annoying, like a lot of Eddie’s trifling quirks. Richie’s brain merely interprets Tony’s temperament as peak hilarity.

In spite of Tony’s best efforts to get them into a road-rage-fueled altercation, they get to Eddie’s place without incident. Richie contentedly listens to him threaten a lawsuit against house number forty-three for failing to shovel their sidewalk.

Inside Eddie’s house, Richie catches Tony glaring at his feet. He dutifully toes off his shoes and leaves them by the door. Tony glances up then, giving him an odd look, like it’d pain to him to give Richie any sign of approval.

He opens his mouth to say something, then jerks his head. His eyelids flutter rapidly. That’s when Richie notices that he’s trying to shake off the flurry that fell in his eye.

Operating on pure impulse, Richie reaches out to grab Tony’s wrist and stares at him.

Tony glowers. “What?”

“Eddie had snowflakes in his eyelashes that day,” Richie blurts out. Either his chest is seizing or his heart is swelling past the size of its physical confines.

“…When?”

Richie shakes his head and lets go of Tony. “Don’t worry about it.”

From the corner of his eye, Richie watches Tony busy himself in the kitchen. There’s an air of exhaustion about him, but he still moves with efficient precision, scooping food out from a takeaway container into a crock-pot.

Tony turns on the TV in the living room but insists that they eat at the kitchenette. He keeps the channel on the local news and gives a running commentary on certain zip codes that are inundated with the dregs of humanity. The longer he rips into the shortcomings of each neighborhood, the more Richie’s convinced that he wouldn’t be able to drag Tony out of New York.

In a way, New York makes sense as a home to Eddie and his alters. It’s got the grime of city streets to rail against, and pristine walls in haughty buildings to power-walk through. Blocks that teem with art and discourse, gateways to adventure and discovery, pockets of rest and safe haven.

Eddie fits somewhere in the middle of it, ensconced in the city’s limitless contradictions.

Tony’s calmer when he puts the dishes away. He’s barely audible when he mutters that Richie didn’t have to come.

“My flight isn’t ‘til tomorrow and Eddie said he had leftover chicken,” Richie reasons. “What was I gonna do, buy groceries?”

“You could’ve walked one block in any direction from your hotel,” Tony grumbles. “There’s at least four restaurants in that area with an A grade.”

“You’re like if the Department of Health made its own version of Yelp.” Richie’s both sardonic and impressed.

After rinsing the dishes, Tony faces Richie while averting his gaze. He unrolls his sleeves, busying his hands. “I know you and Eddie planned to meet four hours earlier. You didn’t have to wait for me.”

Richie shrugs. He’s not comfortable hearing his actions quantified like that. “It’s no big deal.”

“No big deal?” Tony repeats dubiously. “It was grounds for calling off an engagement.”

“Wait. Are you telling me the ex-fiancée left _you_?” Richie balks at his transparent incredulity when he hears it.

“I did what I could to keep the peace. I did my share of chores, followed her diet plans for us. I barely fought back when she criticized me,” Tony says. “But she had meltdowns when I couldn’t leave work on the dot. She’d get paranoid. She’d say stress wasn’t good for me, or that I was covering for something else. She’d say she wasn’t as important to me as my job was.”

“Did she lie, though?” Richie asks before he can stop himself.

“She got two out of three right.” Tony tilts his head, reconsiders. “No, three out of three. I _was_ covering something up – the fact that none of us were in love with her.”

Richie exaggerates a shudder. “Ooooh. Did someone order an ice-cold plate of Tony Macaroni?”

The nickname earns him the classic Kaspbrak murder-eyes. “It came up over and over again, but I refused to feel guilty about doing my job. It got to the point where she had to give up. She said I’d changed. I think- I think she meant that she couldn’t give me a curfew like she wanted.”

Tony is a pillar of defiance, Richie realizes, one that operates just a little differently from Theo.

One thing Richie learns Eddie’s DID: it’s how Eddie survives. It was never a cabinet of placebos that kept him afloat. It’s the parts of him where he tucks away his excesses, keeping him from getting too hard, or too vulnerable, or too hurt.

Even if Richie might never fully comprehend what Eddie gets out of Theo’s audacity, or Finley’s reclusion, or Tony’s rigidity, he at least understands that Eddie gets something from having them under his skin.

Now it’s only a matter of time before they find their way under Richie’s skin, too, if they haven’t already.

>

The first thing Richie says when Eddie answers his call is that he’s got “bad news, Eds”.

“It’s not Eds,” Eddie responds automatically before he processes what Richie says.

“I know who you are.”

“Then you know ‘Eds’ isn’t my name.” Eddie inhales sharply through his nose. He resets. “What’s the bad news? Did something happen?”

“‘Fraid so.”

Eddie’s stomach plummets. “What? What happened?”

“Your job’s going to seem so much shittier than my mine, because I just landed the role of a fucking lifetime!” Richie crows. Eddie breaks into a smile when he hears pounding on the other line, recognizing it as Richie whacking some poor, unsuspecting surface out of excitement. It doesn’t even occur to him to admonish Richie for nearly saddling him with atrial fibrillation.

“That’s amazing. You’re amazing. I’m so fucking happy for you that I’m not even going to get into the aspersions you’re casting on my very normal, very human career.”

“Ed-droid also takes part in ‘very human’ endeavors, _bleep bleep bloop._ ”

“I’m trying to congratulate you, asshole. I really am glad you got the part. You deserve it.” Eddie is scarcely able to subdue his gushing. “You put your all into it, and it could not have gone to a more trash-mouthed individual.”

“Fuck yeah! It’s my birthright to be attached to the second filthiest thing in NYC right behind its subway tracks,” Richie says. “Alright, so that’s the bad news dealt with. Now onto the good stuff.”

“Okay, now I’m scared.”

“I just said it’s good news! Calm your spaghe-tits.” Richie speaks over Eddie’s pained grousing. “As a service to you and your depressing professional life, I’m granting you first dibs at hosting me for the duration of the play.”

“…What?”

“You heard right! You can brag to all the other soulless cattle at Tedium, LLC that you’ve got a future EGOT winner camping out in your living room.”

Eddie bites back the instant protest of having his space infiltrated. “Wouldn’t you want to be closer to midtown? Those shows end late, don’t they?”

“The train to your place doesn’t quit, so it works out. Besides, I’d still save money if I took an Uber out to the boondocks everyday rather than empty out my bank account for a cramped hotel room at the epicenter of noise pollution.”

Eddie wracks his brain for other logical arguments against the arrangement Richie is proposing. Somehow it wasn’t enough to simply refuse an uninvited, freeloading housemate. He scrambles for a suitable point of contention, one that bypassed the real grounds for his reluctance.

Evidently, it takes him too long to come up with something, because Richie interprets his silence as either acceptance or resignation. “No need to thank me. And don’t sweat a single gray hair on your wee head. Rehearsals don’t start until February, so you’ve got plenty of time to hide your fuck benches.”

“What the fuck is a—never mind. Don’t answer that.”

Eddie’s head swims with second thoughts and sluggish arguments long after they hang up. He knows that there’s a one-in-a-million chance that the arrangement is going to end mutually well for them.

But then, there are six people in Eddie’s life that he’d do anything for. And there’s that undead need in him to be near Richie.

The laws of self-preservation and the tenets of true friendship tug him in opposing directions.

The thing is, in all likelihood, Richie never wanted precisely what Eddie wanted, and all they’ve done so far is delay verbal confirmation of that. If there was ever a chance that his pessimism was unfounded, Richie learning about his DID would’ve taken care of that.

Even before the DID bombshell, Eddie has another compelling point of reference. He thinks of a winter’s day blitzkrieg kiss and its aftermath.

After he and Richie clumsily molded their faces together in his bedroom, Eddie willed his watch to speed up and get Richie in his vicinity. But time slipped out of his death grip and trickled out between his fingers.

Back then, Eddie hadn’t made sense of his alters yet. He hadn’t understood why chunks of his days went unaccounted for. On that day in particular, it was less of a concern than the fact that Richie never came over. He didn’t even come to the phone when Eddie called their house and asked for him.

Eddie had to catch him at school. But when he tried to set him aside for a private conversation, Richie attached himself to someone else’s side.

Eventually, Eddie intruded on one of Richie and Beverly’s smoking sessions, holding his nose and standing his ground when Richie carelessly exhaled in his direction.

Eddie lied that Bill was looking for Beverly, and she went along with it. He ignored the conspiratorial waggle of her brow line.

Intent on following her, Richie stamped out his cigarette, halfway used up. Eddie blocked his path. “Are you avoiding me?” he demanded.

Richie had given him an odd look in return. It was pained at first glance, before it contorted into something more severe. Acerbic. Eddie had never expected to see him look like that outside the context of energetic bickering.

Craving a balm for his insecurity, Eddie instinctively sought Richie’s touch. They had always been able to touch each other even in the midst of their worst quarrels – a hand on the shoulder, a brisk ruffling of hair. It was a language they opted for when apologies were too momentous and words of affection too unwieldy.

He reached for Richie’s hand, and for the first time that he could remember, Richie didn’t let him.

“No,” he said.

Eddie was taken aback. He couldn’t keep the hurt out of his voice when he said he washed his hands, as if that had ever been a concern of Richie’s.

“You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t keep your hands clean.” Richie’s tone missed light or jovial by about a dozen lightyears. He sounded like he was accusing Eddie of something, like Eddie was the bad guy.

“I don’t understand,” Eddie complained, not caring that he was creeping into a sulk.

“I can’t do this.” Richie gestured between them almost violently. “You gotta stop doing this, you can’t just.” He made a frustrated sound. “Can we please. I want us to be friends.” His coke bottle lenses magnified his eyes, no longer unfriendly, but beseeching. “Be my friend, okay?”

Eddie never thought he would be devastated to be Richie’s friend. And he shouldn’t have been, but… He’d been so _close_. For one whole day, he let himself believe that he could have what he tried not to dream about.

“I get it,” he managed, distorting his face into something he hoped was accepting. “I’ll always be your friend, no matter what.”

“Yeah. Friends.”

Eddie couldn’t remember if Richie sounded relieved or bitter. All he could hear was a door slamming shut. A lock clicking into place. He remembered the words, _you’re too fragile, Eddie, too weak. You need to stay in here. One day you’ll see that I’m doing this for your own good._

>

Richie brings a large suitcase with him at the end of January, a few weeks before rehearsals start. He wants to give himself time to acclimate to the weather. New York winter is child’s play compared to what he grew up with, but he hasn’t owned a real winter coat in a long time.

Franklin helps him settle in. He shows Richie where the beddings are stowed and the sections of the closet designated for his belongings.

He wears an open, warm expression and an easy smile. It’s as if someone smoothed Eddie out with one of those camera app filters, siphoning some of the hurt and sometimes haunted look out of him.

The night before Richie’s read-through, Franklin sits with him to go over the second act of his play. Repetition is Richie’s least favorite part of the gig, but it’s made so much bearable by the shocked peals of laughter that he can wring out of Franklin. Nothing ups Richie’s serotonin levels like a hard-won pop of dimples.

“How are you going get through the whole thing with a straight face?” Franklin flips through the script. “I can’t believe this is from an actual book that’s available for purchase.”

“Rocky Flintstone is one of the greatest literary minds of all time. Saying otherwise is an egregious waste of oxygen.” Richie flicks the corner of the sheet that Franklin’s reading. “It’s good, right? The script? No pressure on me to do it justice.”

“It’s going to be hilarious,” Franklin predicts. “You’ll be fine if you manage not to get the giggles on the day of.”

“Well now that you’ve said it, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. I’m going to panic-laugh until my lines fuck off to oblivion, then I’ll improvise with bullshit that’ll get me canceled on Twitter because I’m not talented enough to be funny for Gen Z.” What started out as a joke escalates into a full-blown frenzy.

Franklin sidles up next to him until their thighs touch. He enfolds as much of Richie’s frame as he can beneath his arm. “I know a guy that’d beg to differ.”

Richie doesn’t ask for clarity, preoccupied with his stomach actively liquefying. “I’m fucked. That theater’s fucking tiny, I could projectile vomit all over the front row.”

“They’re in the front row. They can afford dry-cleaning.” Franklin’s hands travel a soothing path across Richie’s shoulders, sweeping broadly from left to right. “Hey, it’s okay to be nervous. This means a lot to you.”

“There’s nervous and there’s going off the fucking rails. This is a big fucking deal. This is, fucking, last-ditch effort to resuscitate my career. I can’t not think about what would happen if I bomb, and the more I think about bombing—” Richie hunches over, face in his hands.

“We can figure it out, whatever happens. For now, want to try breathing with me? Or we could read lines again.” Franklin’s motions turn circular, sweeping the expanse of Richie’s back. “You’re in New York. They have their pick of actors here, and they chose you. There’s a reason for that.”

After a few more seconds of Franklin’s mesmeric caresses, Richie finds himself able to sit up, breath steadying. “You do this a lot, don’t you? For Eddie.”

Franklin releases Richie to drag a hand through his hair, currently free from the product that usually holds it in place. “We all take care of him, one way or another.” Richie tracks his fluid movements, far removed from Eddie’s deliberate posture or Theo’s staccato gestures.

“You could do that for a living.”

“Do what?”

Richie almost suggests counseling and changes his mind. “Take care of people. Be the breadwinner of the Kaspbrak household. Let Tony retire and save yourselves from his inevitable cardiac arrest.”

“Tony would sooner beg Myra to take him back than stop being a productive member of society.”

“We’ll find him another hobby. He can binge _Nailed It!_ or _Bake-Off_ while you go rescue everyone from themselves,” Richie suggests. “Else you can get yourself adopted by the Hanscom-Marsh clan and get in on their fashion and building empire. Franklin Kaspbrak-Marsh has a nice ring to it.”

Franklin good-naturedly pretends to consider it. “Does it?”

“You’re already named after Ben. Like—”

“Benjamin Franklin,” they say together.

Richie snickers. “Hey, wouldn’t it be wild if that’s really where you got your name?”

“From one of our founding fathers?”

“No, wise-ass. Think about it. What if you’re actually a Losers Club hybrid.”

Franklin’s brows furrow. “How did we get from Ben Franklin to Frankenstein’s monster, best friend edition?”

“Well, you’ve got this.” Richie reaches out to pinch the side of Franklin’s frames between his thumb and his forefinger, wiggling them up and down. “Eddie doesn’t need glasses. Couldn’t this be your cute little homage to me?”

Franklin giggles and swats his hands away. “It’s pretty farfetched. But you’ll get a kick out of this: I’m Jewish.”

Richie spazzes. “That’s Stan! You’ve got Stan bits, too! Oh, shit!” he exclaims. “What about Bill? Bev? Mike?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

“It could be things Eddie subconsciously projected on you. It’s gotta be.” It seems like a longshot, but it’s a comfort to think that in some way, Eddie’s had the six of them with him all along. “That’d be fucking awesome.”

Franklin nods absently. “Hmm.”

“Something wrong?” Richie asks after a while.

Franklin answers in the negative, but it isn’t convincing. “No, I said something dumb,” Richie deduces. “What is it?”

“Saying something dumb? Must be a novelty for you,” Franklin teases, smile wobbling its way onto his face.

Riche traces back his words to the sound that Franklin makes, too brittle to be laughter. His eyes grow. He’s not sure if he’s got it, but he stumbles over himself to dislodge the foot he’d jammed in his mouth. “No, I didn’t mean you’re just, like, some idea Eddie had.”

“No, no, it—”

“I care about you. I do,” Richie says. “And- uh. Can the others hear me right now?”

Franklin shrugs. “A few of them.”

“That’s fine. There’s a lot banking on the conceit that I can perform in front of an audience.” Richie clears his throat and hacks loudly until Franklin cracks a grin. “Here goes. To you and anyone eavesdropping. When you think the world isn’t big enough for all of you, fuck the world, because I am.”

“You are… what?”

“Big enough. I am fucking huge,” Richie drawls lewdly. “There’s enough of me to go around. If – no, _when_ the time comes that every single one of you comes to terms with your shared desperation for me, I am more than capable of answering the call.”

Franklin chortles. “There’s so much to unpack there, but let’s start with this: ‘every single one?’ You’re old enough to be Finley and Theo’s father.”

“You mean their daddy?”

“No, I do not, that is _vile_.”

One thing Richie learns about Franklin: when he gets going, he laughs so hard he’s slumped over with the force of it. It’s how Eddie sometimes laughs, too.

Richie indulges in predicting the others’ reactions. Eddie’s earnest _I hate how disgusting you have to be sometimes._ Theo’s rapid-fire _shut-the-fuck-up-before-I-make-sure-you-can’t-have-ANY-kids-in-the-future._ Tony’s succinct _fuck you._

>

Another month passes before Richie meets a final alter. He immediately determines that he does _not_ want to learn what Eddie ever needed this one for.

They meet when Richie and Eddie hunker down with a horror flick on an eventless Monday night. It’s refreshing when the terror can’t touch them. They share a heaping bowl of Bob’s Red Mill popcorn (Eddie’s doing) sprinkled with ground cumin and cayenne (Richie’s doing).

Halfway through the movie, Richie’s got Eddie beat in jump-scare outbursts, boasting a 5-3 lead. When he isn’t leaping out of his skin, he notices the angle of Eddie’s torso, how it favors Richie’s direction by an almost negligible fraction.

The movie plot veers off unexpectedly, adding on supernatural elements that takes Richie off-guard. He can tell Eddie is captivated next to him. Eddie seizes up when one of the characters has to be exorcised.

Richie inches further into his space, genuinely concerned that Eddie has stopped breathing as the scene intensifies, speakers swelling with discordant music and frenzied dialogue. He doesn’t hesitate to drop an arm over those tensed sloping shoulders.

Eddie makes a tiny noise that Richie can’t decipher, and in the next second, he’s shuffling around, scaling one leg over Richie’s lap – helping himself to it.

Richie attempts to say Eddie’s name, or form any single cohesive word, but all he manages are a handful of strangled syllables.

“First of all, a scary movie? The yawn-and-stretch maneuver?” Eddie’s pitch lowers, smoky and a little dangerous. His hands grope the span of Richie’s shoulders before creeping up the side of his neck and framing his jaw. “Are you expecting to be rewarded for your clichés?”

“Nggk,” Richie counters.

“I really shouldn’t. But then, everyone else has gotten a turn with you.”

“Who, uh. Who the fuck are you?” Richie finally finds his voice.

Eddie’s face breaks into a predatorial grin. “I’m Pamela.”

“Pam—you’re a woman?!”

Pamela drops his – her? – chin, gazing up through the dark fan of Eddie’s eyelashes. Her thumbs scrape Richie’s stubble with purpose. “Doesn’t seem to me like you’re the picky kind.”

“I won’t say you’re wrong, but I’ve also been in love with one person since I was eleven. Technically one person. Hey, hey, hold on.” Richie reaches up to gather her wrists.

“Oh? So, what, you really are into him?” Pamela leans in close enough that Richie can drink in Eddie’s scent. “That’s cute.”

“Listen. Pam. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but might I remind you, this body doesn’t belong to you. Not exclusively. You can’t do whatever you want unless the other passengers are cool with it.”

“Aw, are you worried about that? You know your precious Eddie would want this.” Pamela writhes closer, eliminating space between them. Richie groans. His grip slackens briefly, but long enough for her to free herself. “Theo was the one that was sexually harassed by the shape-shifting leper or whatever.” Her hands roam over Richie’s shoulders again before bringing their chests flush together.

“The what? He was wh- hey!” Richie grits out, ashamed by the building humidity beneath the collar of his shirt.

“Tell you what, you can call me his name if you want.” Pamela whittles out the sultry huskiness out of her voice when she speaks again. She sounds more natural, almost tender. “Want me to use his voice?”

“Oh fuck.” Richie bucks up against his will, holding the body above him close.

Pamela’s smile stretches and the dimples come out to play. “There we go.” She presses her lips sweetly over his cheekbone, lets them drag over Richie’s heated skin as she talks. “Are you thinking of him, Richie? Do you want us to switch while we’re spread out so nicely for you?”

“Fuck—”

“Yeah?” Pamela gyrates against him, pinning him to the couch and making him chase her each time she pulls way. “He could wake up like this, perched on your lap, hands all over you, sitting right on top of your huge—”

“Ah, god, no! Definitely not! You should definitely not do that!” Richie’s hands skate down to the top of her thighs and drag back up around her waist. His grip tightens, unsure if he’s holding her close or hanging on for his sanity. “I said stop—”

“He’s all yours, baby.”

Pamela gives him a wink, then moves in to seal their mouths together.

“Mmpph!”

Richie feels someone else’s protest on his tongue, hears it vibrate from inside his mouth. “Eddie!” He jumps back, but his fingers stay curled around Eddie’s hips.

“Fuck!” Eddie draws his hands back to his sides. They’re visibly shaking.

“Eddie! I can explain!” Richie can do anything except pry his fingers off of Eddie, it seems.

Eddie is frantically surveying his surroundings like he’s looking for where he placed his legs. “Fuck. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Rich.” He tries to scoot back, and the unintended friction makes them both draw lurid gasps.

Richie flushes at the sound he’d made. “What? You’re not the one who should be apologizing. It’s not—” He finally moves his hands, migrating to the slightly more innocuous spot on Eddie’s shoulders.

“Pamela forced herself on you,” Eddie says mournfully. “She said so much shit.”

“Forced— Eddie, are you fucking kidding me, I’m just as hard as you.” Richie hears what he’d just said and replays it in his head. “Holy shit, when the fuck did that happen?!”

Eddie takes it as his cue to crawl further back, landing closer to Richie’s knees. “You said you couldn’t do this.”

“What? Do what?”

“This!”

That’s helpful. Richie switches gears. “When did I say I couldn’t do this?”

“When I asked you why you were avoiding me! Don’t you remember? It was a couple of days after we… after we kissed the first time.” Eddie slumps as though he’d just winnowed his ribcage. “You told me we should just be friends.”

Oh.

_Oh._

“Because. Because I thought you were fucking with me. You went from kissing me to blowing the rape whistle to holding my hand. All in a week’s time. It drove me—I had no idea!” Richie studies the series of changes in Eddie’s face. “You didn’t know either. Was it Eds-er, Theo? I came to see you the day after we kissed and you told me to fuck off, was that him? Did he brush me off that last day in Derry, too?”

“That was Christophe,” Eddie murmurs. “I don’t know if Theo had anything to do with the first time. I never even. I thought you never came over.”

“It’s okay. Hey, it’s okay.” Richie, disarmed by Eddie’s obvious distress, gets a hand on his back. He folds forward, leaning in to close the gap between them. But when he gets close enough to share Eddie’s breath, Eddie turns his head to the side. Richie’s nose ends up smashing into his cheek. “Eddie? Still with me, or…?”

“Yeah.”

“’Kay.” Richie pats his back awkwardly. “Sorry. Not gonna lie, I was kinda hoping it was someone else who didn’t want to kiss me.”

Eddie climbs off of Richie, and the abrupt loss of his warmth and his weight leaves Richie bereft. He sits next to him, knees pressed together like a scolded schoolboy. “I think you were right the first time. When you said we can’t do this.” Richie tries to interrupt, but Eddie doesn’t let him. “I’ll forget things you tell me. We won’t be able to plan when to spend time together. One of my alters could fall in love with someone else.”

The last one makes Richie flinch. Still, he responds with a simple, “It’s okay.”

“‘Okay’?! None of that is _okay_. It’s not fucking fair. You don’t want that.”

“Oh, I don’t? You know what, fuck you. What I want, how much I fucking want it, that’ll never be the fucking problem,” Richie retorts. “If you don’t want to take this further, then fine. But if you turn me down for ‘my own good’—” his air quotes are like talons clawing into the air “—then fuck you, you couldn’t be more wrong.”

“That’s what Myra thought too,” Eddie asserts. “She was sure we could make it work.”

“Yeah? Maybe you heard, maybe you didn’t, but I basically confessed to your nympho alter that I’ve only ever been in love with one person. So RIP Maurice, but I’m different.”

“Myra,” Eddie corrects. “Rich, you’d have to deal with, like. Seven times worth of one person’s baggage. You’d have to deal with Theo and his mouth. Tony, who hates people and has zero friends at work. Franklin’s- I don’t know. Sweater vest collection. Why does he buy so many? What’s wrong with sweaters that also keep your arms warm?”

Richie lets out a startled laugh at that. “Let him live, Eds.”

Eddie’s shoulders bunch up, looking more troubled than he probably wants to let on.

“Will you believe me when I say I have never picked apart the things about you that I like and don’t like?” Richie says. “Don’t get me wrong, you can be a huge sanctimonious ass. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve been way too fucking fond of this my whole life.” He waves his arm around, tracing Eddie’s form with it. “All of it,” he stresses. “I never stopped, and not even a fucking omnipotent clown could make me.”

Eddie fixes a burnt caramel stare on him, dark and smoldering.

It draws plea out of Richie. “What do you want?”

Eddie thinks. He thinks, and thinks, and Richie lets him. “I want to be with you.” The breath has been punched out of Richie as Eddie goes on, “I do. But I can’t let you be with someone who’s in literal pieces.”

Richie is seconds away from smothering Eddie with his palm, irked by his self-deprecation. Not caring that it makes him a hypocrite. “I don’t think of you that way,” he says instead.

“I know. You’re a good person.” Eddie touches his shoulder briefly while Richie shakes his head, refusing his gratitude. “I don’t want to tie you down to anything—”

“Pity.”

“For fuck’s sake, Rich, not now.” Eddie’s grinning, though. Richie keeps his face neutral. “I’m going to try and get better. I’ll keep going to therapy. And if that helps… I mean, provided this is still something we both want—”

“Then?”

Eddie nods once. “Then.”

Richie’s mouth arcs, cradling a promise.

>

Bill hears it from someone else first, but he takes it in stride. He gives Eddie a call, and his first words after a hasty greeting are the makings of a plan. “Richie’s going to come find you any second now, and when he does, can you act like you’re pissed at him?”

“Just call back in half an hour, I’m sure he’ll do something to piss me off for real,” Eddie says. “What’s going on?”

Richie makes his appearance before Bill can respond. “Hey, can I see your phone for a sec—” He skids to a stop when he catches sight of Eddie. “What the fuck, did he call you?! What boomer bullshit—”

“Richie! What did I tell you about barging into my room!” Eddie cries. Bill didn’t even need to wait half an hour.

“Traitor!” Richie narrows his eyes at Eddie’s phone with bald contempt. “Bill-the-dick Arnold, stabbing me in the back on the very day of my birth anniversary.” He’s loud enough that Bill can hear him, judging from the cackling that filters through the earpiece.

“Your birthday’s two weeks from now,” Eddie reminds him.

“Birthday month.” Richie takes a cautious step forward, hands in front of him to signal his surrender. “Hear me out, okay? In my defense, you should’ve told Bill before you told me. He basically raised you. He’s _Bill_.”

“What was I supposed to tell Bill first?”

Richie’s jaw drops.

It’s Eddie’s turn to gasp indignantly. “Did you tell him about—?!”

Richie sucks in breath through his teeth.

“Get the fuck out of my room!”

Richie scampers away obediently, but not without one last appeal for mercy. “It’s my birthday, you can’t kill me on my birthday!”

“Birthday _month_!” Eddie shouts after him.

“It was an accident, for what it’s worth,” Bill defends him. “Richie ‘Benned’ me.”

“He bent you?”

“Benned-duh,” Bill enunciates. “Pulled a Hanscom. Long story. Ask Richie how he came out to me when we were kids. I swear, you guys are going to give me a complex.”

Eddie sighs. “I’m sorry you heard it from him. I was going to tell you, I was just waiting for the right time. I know that sounds stupid, but it was important to me to tell you in person.”

“It’s not stupid,” Bill assures.

Eddie fills him in on some of the details that Richie hadn’t already revealed. Talking to Bill gives a vague reassurance that things could work out, fills him like a melody he hadn’t heard in years but could somehow still sing along to.

The afterimage of their childhood dynamics is so crisp that it encourages Eddie to ask Bill about family therapy. Dr. Sahana had suggested from the very beginning. She encouraged him to bring someone with him, someone who can support him and help give him more continuity. Back then, Eddie couldn’t conceive of a person who could fill that role.

Bill agrees to grant the favor as readily as Eddie asks it of him. But he admits that it isn’t going to happen in the immediate future, not until his schedule clears up. “It’s why I called Richie,” he says. “I won’t be able to make it to opening night.”

“Bill!” Eddie chides. “You know how much this means to him.”

“I know, I wish I could come. But I’ll be in the clear when post-production starts, around April or May. I’ll come see the show then. And you and I can schedule something with your therapist at that time, too. Sound good?”

“Yeah, that sounds good,” Eddie relents. “Thanks, Bill.”

“Of course.” Bill clears his throat. “Have you brought Richie with you? To your therapist?”

Eddie stiffens. “Uh, no?”

“Uh, why not?” Bill mimics his intonation. “Did you not notice that you two are living together right now? And he’ll go if you ask him to, don’t even pretend like he won’t.”

“It’s…” Eddie searches for an appropriate word. He can only come up with, “Complicated.”

“Alright. I’m not going to play dumb because Richie may have shed some light on this too.”

“God…” Eddie grumbles under his breath. “What did he tell you?”

“Well, I asked how he’s been holding up and he kept being all, ‘it’s fine, nothing to see here, move along’. And I, you know, did what I had to do. Pushed him ‘til he broke, ‘til he went on a rant about one of your alters throwing themselves at him. In his words.”

“For once, he wasn’t exaggerating,” Eddie verifies. “It was fucking mortifying.”

“Honestly, didn’t sound to me like he minded.”

“Shut up. I get it, that’s not the problem. He—” Eddie drops to a whisper as if Richie could hear him through the walls. “We agreed to slow things down. But, Bill, if I take him to therapy with me, he’s going to feel… obligated.”

“Obligated to…? Walk me through this,” Bill requests.

“Obligated to go through with this.”

“Eddie—”

“Bill, it’s Richie! He won’t listen if common sense tells him to give up. It’s not a bad thing. I always wished I could be as sure of myself as Richie was.”

“Richie? Richie Tozier?” Bill checks.

“I don’t know, okay! That’s what my sappy, underdeveloped brain thought. It saw this guy that busted out joke after joke after joke, no matter how much his own friends piled on him for it.”

“He kept going because it made you laugh.”

Eddie feels as if he’s being called out. “The point is, I’m a lot to handle. I can barely handle myself. My _selves_. I can’t dump that on him.”

“You wouldn’t be dumping anything on him,” Bill says. “Don’t shut him out.”

Eddie isn’t entirely sure how to do one thing without doing the other.

“I get doubts, too, sometimes,” Bill confesses after a while. “Like, how could I stay with a person I haven’t done right by?”

“Bill, you’ve got to stop blaming yourself for everything. You couldn’t have known that Audra was going to follow you to Derry.”

“No, not that. Not _just_ that,” Bill says almost entirely under his breath. “I’ve failed her more than once. But whether we stay together despite everything – that’s not something I can work out on my own.”

>

Richie’s schedule ramps up when previews start, leaving him with a single free day per week. His mornings and afternoons are peppered with bookings for interviews and guest spots, including a phone call in the podcast he’s adapting.

With his and Eddie’s schedules rarely aligning, they block off the very first chance they get to set up an appointment with Eddie’s therapist.

The session starts off rough. Theo makes sure of that when he kicks it off with a pointed denunciation.

“You’re here because you want Eddie to get rid of the rest of us,” he accuses Richie. “That’s why you’re sticking around.”

“Why do you think that, Theo?” Sahana gives him her undivided attention.

Theo crosses his arms over his chest. “Because he likes Eddie best. Eddie’s the one that matters to him.”

“You know he isn’t even my favorite Kaspbrak.” Richie moves his legs just in time when Theo aims a kick at his shin. “I’m sticking around because I’m literally being paid to, and because I don’t want to leave until I get all of Eddie’s alters to like me.”

“What, you’re never leaving, then?” Theo snits.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Richie throws back. “Yeah, you’re not getting rid of me until I’ve collected you like Pokemon – like adorable, pocket-sized monsters that are—” (known to evolve) “—lethal when provoked.”

Theo’s hands ball into fists. “Tony would like me to inform you that we are not collectibles and that you are a tool.”

Richie gleefully watches the little vein emerge on the right side of Theo’s neck. He’s fucking catnip to Richie and his compulsive teasing. “Kindly inform Tony that if he wants a turn at handling my PokeBalls—”

“How about instead of doing that, I can fucking kill you?”

Sahana remains impressively calm amid Theo’s hostility and Richie’s proxy for flirting. Her diplomatic demeanor assuages some of Theo’s aggressive instincts and she expertly prevents a crime scene from taking place in her office.

She gets Theo calm enough that a few minutes later, he lets Eddie resurface. Sahana notices the subtle change in him before Richie does. Richie takes it as a slight and a sign that he needs more practice. “Are you back with us, Eddie?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Who was it this time?” Eddie asks.

When he’s told that Theo had just been in charge, Eddie is unsurprised. “If I’ve got to lose any of them, I hope he goes first.”

Richie gasps. “Do not talk about my Eds that way.”

“He’s _my_ Eds— my _Theo_ ,” Eddie corrects himself. “He’s _my_ reckless, argumentative–”

“Self-sufficient, resilient bastard,” Richie finishes for him. “Yeah, I know him too. If anyone should hate him, it’s me, for cockblocking what would’ve been an epic high school romance.”

Eddie glances at Sahana, skimming for her reaction, before turning back to fix Richie a dirty look. “I doubt you needed anyone’s intervention. If Theo hadn’t done it, you would’ve done the honor of cockblocking yourself at some point.”

“Wh- ouch, no striking below the belt. Wait ‘til you get me alone for that.”

“Richie, what did I say?!”

“Not in front of your fucking therapist,” Richie recites dutifully. “Look, I don’t hate Eds, and he wouldn’t let me get to second base with you. That was easily the greatest crime in his list of misdemeanors. But I love that kid. He’s one of you.” He looks to Sahana for validation. “Isn’t that right, doc?”

Sahana pivots her questioning to Richie. “What do you mean by that?”

“Theo and I don’t even get along,” Eddie saves Richie from having to answer. “He hated me when I was younger.”

“Theo says the same thing about you,” Sahana tells him. “He believes you dislike him.”

“I don’t dislike him.” Eddie sits silently for a while. “But if Theo and I fuse, that means he’s really me, right? It’s just who I am. I take on whatever I don’t like about him.”

“You get to be everything about him that’s made him necessary to you,” she puts it another way. When he doesn’t say anything in return, she continues. “Franklin tells me that Theo looks out for you. What’s your take on that?”

“I think he was talking about the time Myra and I were calling things off,” Eddie hedges. “Theo helped then. And it’s true that he helped me a lot before. I’ve remembered other things, too.”

Sahana nods encouragingly. “He mentioned that in the last session. He talked about the placebos, violent encounters with kids at school… Do you know of those?”

“Yes.”

An image pops in Richie’s head, a snarl on a boy upending a medicine bottle over a toilet bowl. “I caught you flushing down your pills. Was that Eds, too?”

“It could’ve been,” Eddie says. “I get that he’s helpful. I just can’t be at a hundred the whole time like Theo is. I’d be exhausting.”

“Do you feel as if you wouldn’t be able to control them if you integrated?” Sahana asks before Richie can butt in with deeply unhelpful commentary.

“I’ve never had to,” Eddie reasons. “I wonder if I can. They listen to Franklin and Tony sometimes.” He grips his own shoulder, arm diagonal across his chest. “But then if they’re gone, and it’s up to me…”

“Remember what we talked about, Eddie, we’re only talking through options,” Sahana reminds him. “You get to decide if you want to integrate. There isn’t one path to getting better, right? Healing looks different for everyone.”

“Yeah, but.” Eddie looks up when Richie reaches up to spread his palm over Eddie’s hand. “Yeah.”

After the session, Richie gets a chance to talk to Sahana alone as Eddie makes arrangements with the receptionist. He asks her if this arrangement is good for Eddie. They ought to know if Eddie is meant to bring along someone more stable with him. Perhaps someone less in love, though he doesn’t mention that part explicitly.

Sahana’s response is far better than anything Richie could’ve hoped for. “I can’t tell you how proud I am that Eddie’s finally brought someone. It will help having someone like you affirming that each facet of him is loved. Even if you may toe the line sometimes with how you express it.”

“I’m toeing the line?” Richie says. “Can I quote you on that?”

Sahana offers a beatific smile, the nicest way anyone’s ever told Richie to fuck off. “To answer your question, yes, this will help him. It will make a difference.”

Richie fights off the self-satisfied smile that threatens to take over his face, but there’s no stopping the tingle of pleasure that courses through him from head to toe.

>

“Yeah, I’d love to audition for a network sitcom… in 1994.”

As usual, Steve is not amused by his client’s antics. “Sitcoms still pay, Richie. With any luck, they get syndicated, then they’re IRA for middling comedians like yourself. At the very least, you’ll have something lined up after the play ends.”

“I don’t know when or where I’m having dinner tonight, why would I have time to worry about my life that far out?” Richie scoffs. “Look, man, I’m not flying cross-country for a fucking sitcom audition. You want me to leave my understudy unchecked for 48 hours? Do you know how elaborately he can sabotage me in that amount of time?”

“At least read the script before turning it down,” Steve wheedles. “Think ahead, Rich. You’re not going to be in New York forever.”

Richie balks at his manager’s verdict. “I’m insulted by your insinuation that I must be contained to one state of living. I will not be tied down to obsolete conventions like a permanent address, or having noiseless elbows when I stretch, or using shampoo for hair-washing purposes.”

Steve wisely chooses to unload the unnecessary information. “Tozier. Please tell me in no uncertain words if there is even one nook in your lawless brain that’s thinking of not coming back to LA once your play is over.”

Richie proceeds to fulfill the opposite of Steve’s request. “Do I want to go back to zero seasons instead of four? Do I want to make it harder for myself visit my parents? Do I want to miss my chance at being Seth Meyers’ back-up guest when one of the more prestigious ones cancels last minute?”

“I have no idea what the answers are to any of those questions,” Steve replies. “Goddamn it, I should’ve known you weren’t done trying to give me an ulcer.”

“You know what they say, scorching digestive juices are the spice of life.”

“I hate to ask, but you got any other wrenches to throw in your career? Ones I might need to know about?”

Richie makes a contemplative noise in his throat. “I’m planning to come out to my adoring masses soon, but I doubt that counts.”

“…Are you insane?!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, we don’t use that kind of language in this household!” Richie says. “Why don’t you say, ‘Richie, are you sure you want to torpedo what’s left of your career?’ Or, ‘Richie, are you too non-zero on the Kinsey scale to function?’”

“I am not being paid enough for this,” laments Steve.

“You should be the one onstage, your dramatics are wasted on this phone call.” Richie reiterates what he’s said to himself repeatedly in the last few days: “Chill the fuck out, it’s going to be a boring non-event. Randos with their misspelled death threats? Those’re like Ambien to me. Once you come out to your parents, everything else is so vanilla.”

Steve is silent on the other line. Then, “I’m going to tell you something. I shouldn’t even bring it up because nothing’s final, but I think you deserve to know this before you make any final decisions.”

“Buddy, you can make me take the paternity test, but I never raw dogged your mother anywhere I could make her pregnant.”

“What the—Jesus Christ!”

Richie hisses through his teeth. For a moment, he forgot that not everyone has borne the full brunt of his arsenal. “Sorry, Steve’s mom. Force of habit.”

Steve takes a second, probably to shake off the disturbing images Richie had put in his head. “There’s chatter about a show being shopped around. A show based on your play. I hear Comedy Central is interested. Allegedly. Like I said, nothing’s set in stone, and even if it does get picked up, the matter of casting is up in the air, but…”

“Holy shit. Holy shit! That is—” Richie’s mind rotates through synonyms for the very word he’d rebuked Steve over. It’s a lot harder to come up with a wholly appropriate term, and he settles with “unicorn shit ice cream sundae!”

“I need workers’ comp for that mouth of yours.”

“You can have whatever you want if that show gets greenlit, because I am an automatic in. Mark my words,” Richie declares. “Those suits would make the mistake of the millennium passing me over. I’m fucking killing these previews. I can barely believe it either, bud, but you’d have firsthand knowledge of it if you bothered to come support the show.”

“For the record, I supported you when I gave you my blessing to go on that audition,” Steve says.

“That is definitely what I understood from ‘fuck it, it can’t get any worse if and when you get blacklisted by the theater community.’”

“I was also keeping it real.”

“And in honor of keeping real, I have no choice but to immediately release a damning exposé on what has made it into my spank bank.”

“Or! You can do the opposite of that.”

“I’m just adhering your credo,” Richie says. “Come on, what do they care what a B-list celebrity gets up to? As long as he’s the guy for the job. If they care, then, fuck it. I dodge a bullet.”

“I’m thrilled for you and your newfound confidence, but B-list is pushing it,” Steve says in the same dry way Stan would. “Look, I’m not telling you you have to stay in the closet, but think. Think of what you’d be getting versus what you’d be giving up.”

“What I’d be getting, you opposite-of-Oprah scum, is that I can stop being ashamed of who I am. I don’t have to hide parts of me just ‘cause some bitchasses can’t handle it.”

He wouldn’t have to pick parts of himself to like and dislike.

One thing Richie learns about himself: he is capable of practicing what he preaches.

After his show that night, he scrolls through his Twitter feed on the LIRR until a reply catches his eye on a post he’d meant to delete. A user with a waterfall avatar expressed their distaste at an admittedly ill-advised joke Richie made about the Oscars’ diversity failings and the thus-far underappreciated faction of Dwight Schrute lookalikes.

 _More commentary from cis white straight dudebros._ _Thanks, I hate it_ 🙃

With palms warmer than usual and fingers shakier than he’d like, Richie retweets it with a comment.

_When you’re right, you’re right, @KelseyTypoFactory. Your one error – you think I’m straight?_

>

Having secured tickets for his friends, Richie knows exactly which section they’re seated in. He makes a concerted effort not to glance at the overly vivid faces that were never designed to blend in.

Although they’re there to support him, their presence heightens his anxiety.

Richie tweaks his internal pep talks for the occasion. They won’t think less of you if you flub a line. They’ll still be there even if no one laughs. Your friendship is stronger than the galactical manifestation of evil and chaos – it will survive a feeble adlib. He runs these reassurances on loop as he spars the constant little terrors that try to fence him in.

When darkness blankets the audience and the spotlights convene on him, Richie submerses himself in his performance. Reality cuts off at the edges of the stage. Two hours fly by, and he escapes with barely a foible behind him and raucous applause in front of him. He’s still breathing at the end of it, all limbs intact. He lives to fight another day.

Richie sneaks out after cleaning up and ducking through a decent-sized flock of selfie-seeking superfans. He hustles to a non-descript diner by foot. Inside, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in one booth are Beverly, Ben, Stan, Patty, Eddie, Mike, and a stranger introduced to him as Mike’s travel buddy. (Richie later learns they met while looking at rescue dogs, which is just about the Mike-est thing he’s ever heard.)

One by one, they fucking fall over themselves to gush over the show. Ben is Richie’s loudest and most profound cheerleader, offering up feminist metaphors that he gleaned from the text that were – in all likelihood – unintended. Stan deigns him with the highest praise (“It was perfectly cast, I can definitely see you thinking that the female anatomy works like that”).

Eddie is the lone hold-out, offering little more than a tight smile.

Feeling simultaneously invincible and delicate, Richie nudges Eddie with an elbow. “What’s the verdict?”

Richie almost misses his whispered answer: “I’m not Eddie.”

“Ah.” Richie allows himself a second of treasonous disappointment, but it doesn’t last. “Did you catch the whole thing?”

“Yeah, I was there from the start. Tony was running late, as usual. Something about global operations leads and deep dive assessments.”

“Don’t start talking about your job,” Richie begs. “I haven’t slept longer than three hours the past week and I will not be able to pretend like I can stay awake this time.”

“It’s _Tony’s_ job. I just took over after he was done to make sure we made it to the show on time.” He awkwardly adds, “It’s Christophe, by the way.”

Richie claps him on the shoulder. “Hey, Chris. I’m glad you and your baby stump legs made it.”

Christophe picks at his salad, spearing a single piece of lettuce. He nibbles its edge, and Richie isn’t sure if it’s a quirk of his or if he’s just uncomfortable under an expectant stare. He takes close to a full minute to polish off the lonely vegetable on his fork, while Richie watches in silence and the others graciously ignore them.

Richie caves and asks again. “So? Was it worth the hustling up to Times Square for?”

Christophe examines his plate. “Theo would get a kick out of the show, even if he’s too young for it.”

Richie preens. “Of course he would.”

“Eddie will like it, too,” Christophe adds. “He worships the ground you walk on.”

Richie ascends to a higher plane. He tries to respond, but he must’ve left his vocal cords behind.

“I never apologized for that morning,” Christophe says, not noticing Richie’s departure from earthly confines. “When I left and let you think that Eddie hated you. He never hated you. Not even when you hurt him.”

Richie curbs his defensive instincts. He lets Christophe finish.

“When he thought you rejected him the first time, he wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t sleep,” Christophe recalls. “It weakened his body. And it made his mom more paranoid. I had to make him strong again. I’d run. I’d take off as fast as I could.”

“You made him strong.” They all do. They make him stronger than he already is. Richie lowers his head, ashamed by his part in Eddie’s heartbreak, as much as he couldn’t be blamed for it. “You said Eddie never hated me, but…”

“I did.” Christophe’s answer to Richie’s unsaid question is straightforward. Hurtful with surgical precision. Then, “And I was wrong to.”

Richie proceeds to softly lose his shit, unreasonably pleased to hear that he’s less of an asshole at second glance.

He tries not to go overboard with it. Christophe is more standoffish and genuinely gets uncomfortable with aggressive affection. Richie pumps his breaks faster with Tony, too – that guy suffers zero bullshit.

He supposes it’s not that unusual. Relationships bring out different sides of people. He sees it in every corner of their booth – sees his friends stepping out of the molds they sometimes inhabit as conversations ebb and flow.

He finds it in Stan’s Patty-haze, how she brings out a smile in him that was once reserved for Georgie Denbrough crafting Stan’s crayon likeness. He finds it in Mike’s vocabulary shifting when he addresses his companion, cadence lilting more expressively. He finds it in Ben resurrecting a self-conscious alter-ego when he talks to Stan and Mike’s plus-ones, traveling back to the time he wasn’t yet flanked by Derry’s unlikeliest heroes.

Richie catches Beverly’s eye and cocks his head in Ben’s general direction. “You’re very chill about your man charming the pants off of everyone. Look at Patty – that’s the face of someone flooding their panties.”

Stan glares daggers in Richie’s direction, while Patty’s only protest is that they’re called _underwear_.

Beverly barks out laugh. “Forgive me but you hardly seem like an expert in that field.” She intercepts a smarmy defense by asking if Richie still smoked.

“I quit. I’m quitting.” Richie waffles between the two. “Definitely one of those.”

Beverly smiles approvingly. “Good. Wanna quit outside with me for a bit?”

Beverly didn’t have to go outside to chew gum, and she certainly didn’t need Richie’s company for it. Her first words when they’re alone reveal her true intentions. “Have you and Eddie worked things out?”

“You heard about that, huh?” Richie makes a choice. “I don’t know. How can I ever forgive him for going to the Comedy Cellar without me fifteen years ago?”

Beverly mercifully plays along. “Fifteen years ago when we had no memory of each other?”

“No excuse for such a heinous betrayal.”

“Was the betrayal that he went to Comedy Cellar without you, or that he watched a comedian who wasn’t you?”

“Both are equally unforgivable.”

“However will you make it past such an act of treachery?”

“It’s gonna be a process.” Richie halts, hearing honesty seep out of him in the Trojan horse of his defense mechanism.

“End scene?” Beverly asks gently.

“It’s going to be a process,” Richie repeats. “And Eddie’s not the only one I have to work it out with.”

Beverly nods slowly. “Right.” She holds back on whatever else she meant to say.

Richie doesn’t push her on it. “At least there’s you guys to give us hope. Putting aside the fact that it took thirty years and one fucked-up ex-husband, you and Ben are fucking perfect on paper. And in 3D surround sound.”

“As long we look it, right?” Beverly says wryly.

“Must be miserable commiserating over how flawed these mortal specks around you are.”

“Beep beep, Richie.” Thankfully, she knows Richie well enough not to take offense.

“Need to get something off your chest? Is there a dark side to cohabiting with St. Hanscom, patron saint of eight-packs?”

That finally gets Beverly to admonish him explicitly. “Don’t do that. Ben isn’t perfect, and you guys saying he is makes him uncomfortable. He’s got his own things to deal with.”

Richie eases off. “Alright. Far be it for me to assume that it’s easy for you two.”

“Don’t get me wrong, he helps makes things easier than I’ve ever had it,” Beverly allows. “But we’ll always have our own things to deal with. The insecurities don’t go away completely, and god knows if the coping mechanisms ever do. We have to share ourselves in ways that don’t come naturally to us, and that’s hard enough when life hasn’t fucked you over more times than you can count.”

“So when you rode off to the sunset, there was nothing waiting for you but a slightly more habitable hell?” Richie sums up. “You telling me the Disney empire is built upon bricks of hyperboles and untruths?!”

“It’s far from hell,” Beverly says. “I’m just saying, even when something goes terribly, terribly right, it doesn’t fix everything else. But the good comes a lot more often than it used to. So there’s that.”

Richie takes a second to gird himself for a moment of honesty. “There’re nights that—yeah, I wouldn’t recommend trying them at home. Pro tip, don’t read news alerts then go to bed knowing that the public’s armed with your death warrant in their screenshots.” His fingers are restless, grasping at a slim phantom limb between them. “But the other part. How much I—what he means to me? The whole reality of him? It hurts sometimes, but even then, it’s the easiest thing.”

Suddenly, Beverly yanks him down into a hug. “Proud of you, Richie Tozier.” She gets lipstick on his cheek, staining it red.

>

Soon, Eddie gets his chance to enjoy the show. He spends majority of the night laughing so hard that he’s set to come after Ben’s title with the abdominal exercise he’s getting. When he meets up with Richie, he showers him in rave reviews before taking him out to a belated birthday dinner.

It’s nearing midnight by the time they’re heading to Penn Station, and the night sky gives way to sweet-tempered raindrops. Eddie offers to share an umbrella, but Richie refuses on the grounds that he’d rather get drenched than give himself scoliosis. Richie comes to regret this mere seconds later, when the light drizzle rages into a heavy downpour.

Richie ducks under the umbrella, grabbing the handle from Eddie so that he doesn’t have to hunch to fit. Eddie protests over riotous laughter, curling close to get away from the rain pelting his side. He ends up more or less tucking himself right under Richie’s chin. It’s so peaceful, so blissfully _ordinary_ that Eddie wouldn’t be surprised if he’d dreamt up the entire night.

Naturally, the moment he’s lulled into a sense of security, things take a turn.

On the train ride home, a passenger recognizes Richie. At first, the man strikes up an innocuous conversation about how Twitter blew up with news about him. It goes into iffy territory when the stranger deduces that Richie’s detractors aren’t entirely culpable for their attacks. Some of Richie’s ex-fans might be assholes, he says, but others may feel betrayed that Richie doesn’t come as advertised.

Richie diffuses the situation in typical fashion. “I turned out to be a decent actor, you mean?”

The stranger just doubles down on his pseudo-psychoanalysis. “No, like, you aren’t what you presented yourself to be.”

“Is this ‘cause I’m playing an English guy? I’m pretty sure my fans can tell I’m faking the accent.”

Eddie doesn’t understand how Richie is staying calm, because his blood is fucking searing underneath his skin.

And this guy won’t give up. “You know.” This time, he gestures between Richie and Eddie salaciously. As if Eddie were currently shoving his face in Richie’s crotch instead of simply sitting next to him.

Eddie’s had it. “Are you seriously implying that Richie let his fans down by not being straight?”

Richie’s hand closes over Eddie’s wrist. “Don’t mind him.” He could be addressing either of them.

The stranger appears surprised by Eddie’s outburst, eyes widened. “No, no, that’s not how _I_ feel. I don’t agree with them, but I can kind of understand where they’re coming from.”

“Well, I don’t. Fuck them. Fuck them all, to be honest,” Eddie retorts. “They didn’t give a fuck where _Richie_ ’s coming from. They didn’t give a fuck that Richie did what he did in a society that thinks hatred only takes place if it’s followed by a funeral.”

Richie tugs at his wrist again. Eddie ignores him. “If you’re bothered that you made incorrect assumptions about someone’s fucking orientation, then guess what, that’s your fucking problem. You don’t deserve to be understood. You don’t deserve _Richie_.”

He punctuates this dressing-down by going off on a strop. It would’ve played better had he not lost his balance getting to his feet, but he at least avoids taking down other passengers as collateral damage.

He makes it to the other end of the car before settling into a free seat to stew in his anger alone. He doesn’t get much time to do it, since another body plops down next to him, almost immediately. Before he can spring back up to his feet, Richie gathers him in his arms and holds onto him.

“Eds,” he says, “you are literally my fucking hero.”

Eddie bristles with lingering irritation. “Don’t call me Eds. I’m not Theo.”

“I know it’s you.” Richie releases him but keeps one arm fastened over his shoulders.

Eddie thinks that this is what it must be like to be Theo—to be consumed by anger. His completely valid anger, in this instance. To let his emotions fuel his behavior without a thought for consequence. “How can you stand Theo?” he asks.

Richie pulls him closer, stopping short of putting him in a headlock. “To borrow the words of one of our wisest philosophers, Theo is such a bitch and I like him so much.”

“I don’t know if I can be him,” Eddie says. “I don’t know if I can be any of them. If I can—” He drops his voice. “Be the guy that killed Bowers. The guy that cut ties with his mom.”

Richie’s expression takes the form of a request, asking for blanket permission to voice his thoughts.

“Don’t,” Eddie asks of him. “I know.” It’s taken some time, but he knows it now. “I know who I am.”

“Okay,” says Richie. “You’ve already heard the gist of it tonight.”

Eddie eyes him cautiously, then he’s muffling himself, smearing three words into Eddie’s hair.

_My fucking hero._

>

Richie comes around later that night, when Eddie’s already under his covers. He lounges at the corner of Eddie’s bed, wiling away his insomnia.

“Do you have a favorite?” wonders Eddie. “It’s okay if you do. I like Franklin the best.”

Richie looks insulted by the question. “You expect me to answer that?”

“Answer me, coward.”

Richie rolls his eyes. “Pamela, duh.”

Eddie scowls. “You’re the worst.”

“You asked.” Richie pauses for a beat and sobers. “I don’t have a favorite, you’re all disgustingly lovable. I’ll miss if any of them—any of you goes away.”

Eddie considers the pronoun and doesn’t correct it. “I think I’d miss them, too,” he admits softly.

“I don’t think they’d ever really be gone,” Richie says. “It’s like, even when you had DID and supernatural amnesia conspiring together? You still got Franklin, who’s basically a mash-up of me and the other losers.”

“Franklin? Did Dr. Sahana say that?”

“Just something I thought of. ‘Cause it’s also like—fuck, I can’t believe I’m telling you this.” Richie shakes his head. “It’s also the fact that everyone I’ve ever tried to get with had these fucking giant Precious Moments eyes. Or they gave back at least as good as they got. Or were a head shorter than me.”

Eddie closes his eyes and pulls the sheets up to his chin, resists the urge to suffocate himself with it. “I’m not a head shorter than you. Why are you so committed to being a dick?”

He feels the weight of the mattress shift as Richie crawls up. He peeks through the sheets, opening one eye. He spies Richie sitting next to his head, leaning on the headboard. Grinning down at him. “Take it up with Went and Mags. I didn’t name myself.”

Eddie turns to his side, facing his back to Richie. “I still don’t know if I should integrate with my alters or not.”

“Like doc says, you don’t have to decide right away.”

“I just wish they weren’t such assholes sometimes,” groans Eddie.

“Please, you know you’re plenty mean on your own. Just ask that unfortunate dumbass that got eviscerated on his commute home.” Richie’s hand slides up Eddie’s nape to card through his hair. Eddie presses his lips together to contain a sound of approval. “I liked it, for the record.”

“You like when I’m mean?” Eddie asks skeptically.

“You’re only mean when someone really deserves it,” Richie says. “I like when you’re nice, too. I’ll like you and your alters if they stay the way they are now, I’ll like you if they don’t.”

“I like all your parts, too.” Eddie turns to squint at the beginnings of a smirk sprouting onto Richie’s face. Richie retracts his hand just in time so that it doesn’t get crushed behind Eddie’s skull. “Don’t you dare. Don’t ruin this.”

“But I didn’t—”

“You were about to say something disgusting when you knew exactly what I meant,” Eddie accuses him.

“Then don’t give me those openings.” Richie guiltily adds “or do” at the exact same time that Eddie warns him to shut up.

“Yeah, I know what you meant. I’ve got pinging parts that go zip, zip, zip.” Richie pokes Eddie’s cheek thrice, one for each ‘zip’. “Firing away 24/7, can’t keep ‘em down. And I’ve got, uh. These cave-dwelling, high-distortion, Ewok-sounding little heathen parts. Piling on with the infinite ways I can fuck up.” He runs his finger along Eddie’s hairline, like he can’t stop touching Eddie when they’re in close proximity. “And I’ve got these… maggotty bits. The part of me that’s entirely gone for you.”

“Maggotty?” Eddie repeats, ignoring the other half of his declaration. “Wow. I can’t believe I ever doubted what you felt for me.”

“No, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s gross! I mean, it kind of is. But it’s just so- so squishy, you know? It’s squirming around and pulsing all the time.”

“Can you please stop attaching descriptors of _larvae_ to your feelings about me.”

“Shut up, I’m romancing you. I need to talk about the maggoty part, because it could realistically get me killed one day, sure, but it’s going to outlive me.” Richie smiles, too stupidly sincere for someone aggrandizing maggots. “It’s one of the best fucking things about me. In the top five, at least.”

“You can’t have a top five if your list is two items long.”

Richie roars in laughter. “Told you you’re plenty mean on your own.” He slips his hand beneath the blanket and wriggles his fingers into Eddie’s side, earning an ear-piercing shriek. “God, I love you.” His arm and jaw drop at the same time. “Fuck. Taking things slow! I am taking things slow.”

Eddie shakes his head as he dislodges Richie’s arm. “We’re allowed to say that to each other.”

“Oh. Oh, good. See, I wouldn’t know that, because it’s not like you’ve said it to me.” Richie chokes out a laugh. “Not that you have to say it just ‘cause I did.”

One thing Eddie learns about himself: he is braver than he used to think. And so he agrees, “I don’t have to say it. But you should know that I love you, Rich.”

“Okay,” Richie squeaks. “That did it. Richard the Well-Endowed, down for the count.” He grabs his chest dramatically and lands in a heap beside Eddie. Slowly, he turns his head to face him. “I’m in bed with my killer.”

“A questionable survival strategy.”

Richie props himself up on one elbow. “What a way to go, though. If it meant I could… wake up next to you…?” An upward spike at the end turns it into a question.

It pains Eddie to remind him, “It might not be me you wake up next to.”

Richie shrugs one shoulder. “You say that like it matters to me.”

Eddie frowns. Is he allowed to be jealous of his alters? “Nice, Rich. Way make us sound interchangeable.”

“Nice, Eds. Way to shame me for being a slut for you.”

“Just go back to talking about maggots. Considering how old some of my alters are, I should have you arrested.”

“Good thing you’re the ripe old age of 40, Eddie my love, because you’re juuuust tall enough to get on this ride.” Richie grabs the hand that reaches out to swat his chest, smoothly lacing their fingers together. “This okay?”

Eddie kicks one leg free from underneath the blanket, hooking his ankle over Richie’s and flexing his toes flexing to slip the cuff of his sweatpants. He almost doesn’t recognize himself in the move. It makes him think that maybe this is what it’s like to be Pamela—to not be ashamed about what he wants. “Stay here. I don’t want you to leave.” He can’t quite say “ever”, not just yet, but he manages a soft, “please.”

Richie makes a strangled, wheezing sound. “If you do that again and call me daddy this time.”

Eddie uses their joined hands to whap Richie’s sternum. He curses him out, hoping that’s enough to distract Richie from commenting on the fact that he’s dragging the blanket over them with his free hand, cocooning them both under the covers.

Richie says nothing, but his widening smile is almost worse. “I can’t wait ‘til I can kiss you.” He jerks, inadvertently squeezing Eddie’s hand. “Shit, not again! It’s not my fault. You destroyed the last brain-to-mouth filter I had with your stupid, beautif—”

“Don’t wait.”

“—fh _ahhhh._ What.” Richie gapes. “What did you say? Are you sure?”

Not trusting what he might sound like, Eddie nods.

Richie plants his elbow closer to Eddie’s shoulder, looming directly over him. “Sorry, I.” He changes his mind about whatever he was about to say, choosing instead to lower himself until he can nuzzle Eddie’s nose with his. “This one’s for Finley.” He presses his lips firmly to Eddie’s forehead. “For Theo.” On the cheek. “For Pam, you saucy wench.” On the shoulder. “Christophe. Franklin. Tony.” Bicep, palm, fingertips. He moves higher, lips hovering over lips. “Spaghetti.”

“I swear—”

At first, Eddie can’t contain his giddy huffs long enough to be properly kissed, but it’s okay. Richie doesn’t fare much better. In time, their smiles melt against each other, shivery sighs drawn into another’s mouth.

When Richie breaks away, it drags a whine out of Eddie that is promptly shushed with a firm peck. They follow it up with another, one more for good measure, and a final one that lingers, needful and sweet.

Eddie doesn’t know how slow they need to take things. He isn’t even entirely sure what to wait for, what “being better” looks like. Some days are going to better than others, for sure. He thinks it’ll be great if, on some of those good days, it could just be him and Richie. They could make out like teenagers, then fall asleep like old men.

Even now, Eddie’s never felt more like himself. Like every part of him is alive, every part of him is whole. Like right now, there’s nobody else that he wants to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for making it to the end! I'm especially self-conscious about this fic, but I welcome any constructive criticism.
> 
> While we’re here, I wanted to wish you a happy pride month! And you may have already seen this, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to share [this resource](https://msha.ke/30flirtyfilm/) to help honor Breonna Taylor on her birthday.
> 
> ETA: [Meet the alters](https://hanlonging.tumblr.com/post/620136289855995904/greater-than-ao3-fic-for-reddiebang-collage-by)!


End file.
